


The Related Worlds of Neville Longbottom

by backinyourbox



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Alternate Universe, Chrestomanci, Implied Violence, Implied/Referenced Torture, Multi, Multiple Worlds, Slavery, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:06:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 47,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27004786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backinyourbox/pseuds/backinyourbox
Summary: Somehow, somewhere, a Neville-shaped hole has been ripped through reality. Each of the Neville Longbottoms from the related worlds are being pulled through to the same place. For some it's a curse, for Number Five, it's a blessing. But they can't all stay in the same world forever, and Number Five might be the only one who can fix the gap before the paradox causes the entire world series to collapse - if he can do it without being dragged back into his real life nightmares. (note: while technically a Chrestomanci crossover, you don't need to be familiar with the Chrestomanci universe to read this story)
Relationships: Hannah Abbott/Neville Longbottom, Neville Longbottom/Draco Malfoy, Neville Longbottom/Ginny Weasley, Neville Longbottom/Luna Lovegood, Tracey Davis/Neville Longbottom
Comments: 13
Kudos: 20
Collections: My HP Favorites





	1. Number Five

_“No, don’t - please, PLEASE - come back!"_

_He’s running, running through the forest, a panicked voice echoing in his ears. His friend is behind him, trying to stop him, but he’s faster - he knows the forest better than anyone except maybe Hagrid and Professor Sprout. He’s twenty-one, and the war has dragged on longer than anyone had imagined it could. Tonight it’s going to end, and if he doesn’t get there in time it’ll end the wrong way._

_“Stop! Please! You won’t make it - they’ll kill you -” Fainter and fainter._

_Sorry, Draco._

_He knows these trees, knows the springy texture of the earth under his feet. He lived here for a while, when things were bad. The trees know him, know he is trustworthy, and they part to let him through and close behind him. The voice gets more and more distant as he gets further and further ahead, and then he sees the glow of wand light._

_He runs on, he runs past the edge of the clearing, through the astonished crowd of dark robes and right into the onrushing beam of green light, just in time._

_He expects it to feel peaceful, but it does not; instead he feels a sudden, terrible sense of wrongness, and the sensation of a hole opening underneath him, not in the earth but in something unseen, something huge and shifting and terrible, and he falls away, away..._

_His last thought is: It wasn’t supposed to go like this._

Pain.

That was the only thing Number Five knew for sure. He wasn't even sure where he was. The last thing he remembered was the cellar-turned-dungeon at Malfoy Manor, and the sound of his own screaming echoing in his ears. Then he’d dreamed of running, running with a freedom he hadn’t so much as dared to imagine for a long time. Then he’d died in the dream, and that must have been what had woken him.

But now it was quiet, and it didn’t feel like the dungeon. The air around himself seemed cleaner, warmer. The surface under him was softer than stone. His fingers twitched against something woolly. Too soft to be grass, and no bird sounds. 

He couldn't think enough to make sense of it. His head was pounding. His back felt like it had been ripped to shreds, naked, torn flesh exposed to the air. He could feel congealed blood on his hands and around his waist where it had pooled around the edge of his thin cotton trousers. How many lashes before he had passed out? Forty? More? Why wasn't he dead? 

_Lestrange._ Probably she’d given him a healing potion. It wouldn’t suit her for him to die - no - that would spoil all her fun. 

He thought about opening his eyes. Then thought better of it. Maybe he could go back to sleep, and if he slept long enough maybe he could just die, peacefully… that’d show her.

"Oh, hell,” exclaimed a voice, male and unfamiliar, on the edge of his hearing. Then it was swearing, mumbling curse words, coming closer. 

He tried to move, to get away from it; none of his limbs would answer. He braced himself for a blow, for more pain. _Just kill me_ , he thought, hopelessly. _Please, just make all this go away. I can’t take it anymore._

"Hermione?” The voice spoke again, distantly, and Neville’s confusion intensified, but whoever it was did not seem to be speaking to him. “It's me. I've got another one. It's really bad. No, worse than the last one, I'm not kidding… there's blood everywhere! He needs a healer, right now! Bloody hell... Yeah, I'll meet you there. Okay."

He moaned and flexed his fingers through the pain, trying to drag himself up, but suddenly the voice was right next to him. "Don't move. It's all right, I've got you..."

He took a sharp breath and his eyes came open of their own accord. The view was fuzzy, as though he were looking through mist. A brown-haired man was bending over him, holding a wand.

"Don't…" he begged, hoarsely, his own voice barely audible even to himself. "Please…" 

"It's all right," the voice said again. "You're safe. I'm going to Apparate you to St. Mungos. Take my hand."

He had no intention of doing any such thing willingly, but rough, strong fingers were already being forced between his, and then…. _no, please no,_ he was _dying._ He couldn't breathe, his chest was being squeezed in a vice, his head was going to explode… 

He closed his eyes, and let the pain take him away again. 

* * *

When he woke the next time, he was lying on a bed. This was amazing in itself. He couldn't remember the last time he had been near a bed, let alone lying in one. The next thing he realised was that he could suddenly _think,_ marginally clearly, for the first time in days. Most of the pain had gone. 

He opened his eyes to a dark room, a plain ceiling up above, and turned his head to see a plain wall and three plastic chairs. _Hospital?_ He searched, found a distant, foggy memory of someone finding him, Apparating him. Why?

"He lives,” someone said, very close by. 

He jumped at the voice and looked quickly to the other side. The movement jarred his back, and a lance of fresh pain went through him. This was nothing new; he barely made a sound, only grimaced and squinted over to see who had spoken. 

It was quite dark in the ward, but his eyes were used to the dark, so that what little light there was still stung at his eyes, and he could see perfectly well. There was a young man lounging on another bed next to his, but he didn’t seem to be a patient. For one thing he was fully dressed, in long dark robes and tall, expensive-looking boots. He had light brown, loosely-curled hair and was looking at him curiously. He was oddly familiar. 

"Kneazle got your tongue?" the man asked, raising both eyebrows in an aristocratic sort of manner. It reminded him eerily of Draco Malfoy.

He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could think of anything to say, something caught in his throat and he started coughing uncontrollably. 

The stranger seemed unimpressed at watching him hack up his lungs onto the clean white sheets. "Merlin. I hope you haven't got some kind of plague. You certainly look like you’ve travelled in time from the middle ages."

He ignored this, concentrating on catching his breath between violent coughs. His chest ached with the effort until the fit subsided a little. "Why…" he managed to splutter hoarsely when it was just about over. "... why aren't I dead?"

"You _look_ dead. Less dead than when they brought you in, but still." The stranger hifted on his bed, irritably, shaking out his arm in a strange way.

Looking closer, he realised with a shock that the suave man was handcuffed to the bed he was sitting on. The handcuffs were bright red - enchanted? They'd have to be, to hold any kind of decent wizard.

"Are you… a rebel?" he asked, eyes wide. Was it possible the man had just been captured? Had he been on the outside this whole time? He didn’t look like a runaway, he looked rich - a Pureblood, probably - with his fancy boots and well-kept, soft hair. But why else would he be a prisoner? "Why are you…" he started to ask, marvelling at his own daring.

"Oh, this?" The man shook the handcuffs and shrugged. "I suppose they're afraid I'll make a break for it. They've all gone for food. Nice of them to leave me behind to watch you, eh? You've been out for hours. I wouldn't move too much, by the way - "

He had tried to sit up, and fell back with a groan. His back burned with the fire of a thousand hot suns. He cursed, loudly.

"Nice language," sneered the man on the bed. "Didn't your mother ever teach you not to swear like that? Or don't you have one? Only two of us have real parents, so far, and apparently mine don't count."

He felt a rush of anger that momentarily outweighed the pain. He glared. "Don't talk about my parents.”

The man seemed unfazed by this. "Only if you don't say anything about mine,” he said, calm but sharp. Then, “What's your name?"

He blinked, wondering if he should say. He still didn't know where he was. Had he been kidnapped? Or rescued? It seemed unlikely. Maybe he should be trying to keep his identity a secret. But then, that was stupid and impossible. He reached under the sheets with his right hand for his left wrist. It was still there, of course. A silver band which encircled his arm too tight to move more than half an inch in either direction. Under his fingertips he could feel the words engraved on it.

"Neville," he muttered.

The stranger blew a lock of hair out of his eyes, impatience radiating off of him. "I know that," he said. "What's your last name?"

Now he was thoroughly confused. If the stranger knew one name, he would know the other, surely? "Er… Longbottom?"

"Damn. So are all the others. Guess I'm just special." The man grinned, showing white teeth, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes. "I'm Neville Lestrange," he said, quite casually.

He froze. "L… Lestrange?"

The stranger sighed. "Yeah, most people here have that reaction. I was adopted. Never thought about it much until I came here - no, don't!"

Neville scrambled to the other side of the bed on his elbows. His back screamed protests of agony, but he couldn't afford to think about that now. Lestrange was just playing games with him now! "Where is she?" he demanded, looking around as though the madwoman might appear suddenly in a puff of smoke.

"Who?" the man frowned. "My mother? Back home, probably. Somehow I doubt she's pining too much over me. Oh, stop that." He sighed. "I'm told she's dead here. She's not going to do anything to you. Stop hurting yourself, idiot."

Neville thought his head was going to explode. _I’m told she’s dead here_. 

None of this made any sense. 

"What… what the hell is going on? Where am I? Who are you?"

"You're in St Mungo's Hospital, on account of missing all that skin. As to what the hell is going on… well, your guess is as good as mine. Me? I'm Neville. So are you. There are five of us now, if you count the original one from this world. They call me Number Three." He made a grimacing expression at this as if to show just what he thought of this unoriginal moniker. "You'll be Number Five, I guess. Hermione will explain it better than me."

"Hermione?" Neville felt his heart lift a little despite the pain, the confusion and the rising nausea. He remembered as though through a fog, her name being spoken into the distance. "Hermione's here?"

"Yes - not your Hermione though, the Hermione from this world. Get it?"

"No. What do you mean, this world?"

"There's more than one. Apparently. Same people, different lives. I grew up as the heir to the most powerful wizarding family in the world, and you… were fed to some kind of wild animal, I'm assuming?"

Neville glared. He decided he did not like this man. Even if he was, somehow, another version of himself, which was impossible. He didn’t even look like him...

He frowned and tried to focus on the features. The man's face was much better fleshed than his own, his skin better coloured, his hair richer and healthy-looking. Perhaps it was possible that if he, Neville, hadn't been locked inside for four years, if he had washed properly at all in that time, or spent any time in the sun, or eaten properly… maybe he would look like that. Maybe.

Tired of being stared at, Lestrange rolled his eyes and made a face at him. 

Light flooded the room for a moment and Neville had to shut his eyes tight; then it went away again as the door closed. 

"Oh, you're awake!"

Neville looked up quickly to see a tall, bushy-haired woman coming towards him. There were a few more people trailing behind her, but he was so glad to see her that he barely looked at them at all. The last time he had seen her… well, she had been a lot thinner, for one thing. Her hair had been cropped short, and she had been looking at him through bars. This was the girl he remembered from before the war, Ron's girlfriend, the one who had helped him with his Charms NEWT, before everything had gone to hell.

"Hermione!" he exclaimed.

She smiled at him. "I'm so glad you're all right, we were so worried - he hasn't been saying anything horrible, has he?" She gave the man on the bed - Lestrange? - a dirty look, and he raised his non-cuffed hand in a kind of mock surrender.

"N-no…" Neville looked between them with confusion. "He was trying to explain what’s happening… but I still don't get it…"

"Never mind that right now, for now we have to make sure you're not going to collapse again. How's your back?"

Neville moved gingerly, testing. He realised that there must be bandages on under his clothes - white hospital pyjamas, not too unlike his uniform in any case - because there seemed to be a lot of padding back there. He couldn't reach to feel, though, and every movement sent another wave of searing pain up and down what had been raw flesh. "Better?" he guessed.

"Mm." Hermione seemed unconvinced. "You were almost dead when Number One brought you in. Do you remember what happened to you? How you got hurt?"

Neville suddenly felt sick with humiliation. Of course he remembered. The same thing had happened almost every night for the last week.

Hermione seemed to accept his silence as explanation. She waved forward one of the people she had brought with her and turned to him. "Could you just check?” she said, in a low voice. “We need him to be able to think clear enough for this conversation - I don't want to put him through anything like this if he's in pain…"

Neville looked up at the man she brought forward, and blinked in surprise. He looked just like the one who had called himself Lestrange. Perhaps not quite as suave, not as well dressed - he was wearing jeans and a green T-shirt, Muggle clothes that Neville hadn't seen the like of in years - and not in quite as good shape, physically. But they definitely could have been brothers, even twins.

"Er… are you a Neville too?" he asked, nervously.

The man smiled. It was a much kinder smile than Lestrange’s. "You're catching on,” he said, sounding pleased. “I'm Number Two. I'm a Healer. Is it all right if I check you over, quickly? It won't hurt."

Neville felt like a child being fed a nasty tasting potion. His whole body railed against being touched; intellectually he knew that _someone_ had to have put the bandages on at some point, but he’d been asleep, so that was different.

He swallowed. "I… I haven't had a healer… in years. I…"

"Don't be afraid. It'll help." The man sat beside him on the bed and reached out. Neville closed his eyes, trying not to flinch. There was the light touch of a cool hand against his forehead. 

At first nothing seemed to happen, then a feeling came over him, comforting, like someone stroking his hair but on the inside. It felt weird, but it didn't hurt. In fact, after a minute he felt relaxed, then peaceful. As though all the pain and terror of the last few days were slowly being extracted through that cool touch. The throbbing pain in his back slowed, then faded.He felt his mind become even clearer. 

When he opened his eyes, Number Two was looking at him with tears visible in his eyes. "Who did this to you?" the man asked, hoarsely.

"Two," Hermione said, warningly.

Two looked up at her, startled, then nodded slowly. "He's all right for now. He needs rest, but…"

"Can I talk to him?" she asked. 

"I'm still here," Neville reminded her. He suddenly felt more capable than he had in months; maybe years. He shuffled up into a sitting position. His back twinged, but didn't ache as much. "That's… much better." He looked up at Number Two. "Thank you."

The man nodded, then looked away as though he couldn't bear to meet his eyes for too long. He sat on the bed on Neville’s other side, keeping as far away as possible from Number Three, Neville noticed. Hermione and the third man sat on the bed on the other side.

Neville turned his attention to this other man for the first time. Now he knew what he was looking at, it was definitely _another_ Neville. He looked more like Number Two than Number Three. He looked like he had grown up eating proper food, and he was wearing good clothes. Or they would have been good, if there wasn't blood all over them.

"It's yours," said the man lightly, when he noticed Neville looking. "You popped up in my sitting room. Bled all over the carpet."

"Oh." Neville wondered if he was meant to feel guilty about that. How could he help where he bled over? Even Lestrange didn't punish him for bleeding. “Sorry,” he said, for lack of anything else. 

"Neville, this is Number One," Hermione said gently. "The… original Neville. That is, he's the Neville for the world we're in at the moment. Do you… know about the related worlds?"

Neville stared at her. "No..." 

"Right. Well… it's a bit complicated, but long story short… there are hundreds of worlds. Some of the similar ones are connected, and those worlds are called a world series. There are usually twelve to a series, and each series has its own set of worlds which could be any number - our series has nine. The connected worlds can be observed by the others, to some extent, usually only in dreams or magical trances. The related worlds usually have a lot of the same people in them, but because the worlds are different, the people are different, too."

"So…" Neville tried to force his brain into some kind of order. New information was not something he was used to dealing with. He couldn't remember the last time he had learned something new. It was always orders - do this, do that, _don't scream until I tell you_ … "There are nine versions of me?" he asked, hesitantly.

"Theoretically, yes." Hermione agreed. "Though in your case we know at least one is dead, so no more than eight."

"How do you know one is dead?"

"Well, I'm getting ahead of myself really. This all started a month or two ago. Number Two here," she gestured to the healer, "appeared on our Neville's doorstep without any idea how he got there. You all seem to come through near _our_ Neville, for some reason. Three more have arrived since then, including you. I'm trying to figure out how to sort all this… I've been doing a lot of research into the related worlds and trying to contact them. I got through to one world in a trance, but I couldn't find their Neville because he’d been killed."

"Oh," Neville couldn't think of what to say to that. A strange image floated across his mind, of running through trees, the branches moving out of his way of their own accord. Someone far away was shouting. He shook his head, trying to make it go away. "But… sorry,” he managed, staying polite out of habit, “why is this happening?"

"No one knows. There's some kind of instability in the related worlds that's led to all of you being shoved into the one reality. It sounds insane, at first, I know…"

"It _still_ sounds insane," yawned Lestrange - Number Three - tugging at his handcuffs. "Can someone take these off now?"

"No," said Hermione and Number One, at the same time. 

Three rolled his eyes. "They all hate me,” he said to the ceiling, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “It's not fair."

"But…" the conversation from earlier was coming back to Neville now, making his head spin even faster. " _He_ said his name was Lestrange… that _can't_ be…"

"It is," said Number One, rather darkly. "He was adopted as a baby. In _his_ world, Bellatrix Lestrange rules wizarding Britain, and she's his mum."

"It's not like I asked to be adopted," Three growled.

"You're a Dark Wizard," Number One said shortly. "The handcuffs stay on while we’re in public."

"I told you,” Three muttered, angrily, “I'm not even _in_ the army, I've never killed anyone -"

"Shut up."

Hermione shook her head. "Will the two of you stop? You're scaring him."

Neville realised he was shaking. "N-no, I'm fine. Just… being Lestrange's son… I'd rather _die_ …"

"Tell me about it." Number One yawned. He looked exhausted. “The point is, biologically we’re all still the same. We did lots of tests early on to make sure of that. So he’s one of us still, no matter what his name is.” 

Three made a grimacing, sulking expression and stopped tugging on the handcuffs.

"There are some things you all have in common so far," Hermione continued, giving her Neville a warning look. "You're all called Neville. Your parents _\- biological_ parents," she added, rolling her eyes as Three looked about to protest. "Were - or are - Alice and Frank Longbottom. And you're all the same age, that is, from the same time in your relative timelines. It was April fourth for you, wasn't it?" she asked, with typical Hermione-ish thoroughness.

Neville hesitated. "I'm sorry, I… I don't know," he said eventually. "I'm twenty-one, I think, if that helps… sorry…"

Hermione looked at him sympathetically. "All right. Don't worry about it. Now, it's all going to take some getting used to, I'm afraid. There are probably a lot of things that are different here to your own world. There might even be some people alive who are dead in your world, or vice versa. Some people might not have even been born. We're keeping you all in a safe place until we can figure out what's going on and how to reverse it…"

"What?" Neville gasped. "Reverse it? You're going to send me back?"

"Er…" Hermione looked a bit shaken. "Well… everyone else has wanted to go back, so far…"

"I don't! You think I want to go back, to that… that place, that house, to be tortured and treated like an animal…" Neville felt hot tears come to his eyes, but he would not cry, he hadn't cried in years, and he was not going to do it now. The pain was coming back with a vengeance, his back fired up and he bit his lip hard to keep from crying out. "I won't go back!" he said, his voice almost breaking.

"Oh dear." Hermione looked at a loss for words.

Number Two, the Healer, leaned forward and put a hand on his shoulder. Neville tried to shake it off, but the man had a surprisingly strong grip.

"Let me go!" he demanded, trying to break free. 

"You need to rest,” Two said softly. The voice was very commanding. Hard to resist. The cool hand came once again to rest on his forehead, and he was vaguely aware of a wand in the man's other hand. "Sleep."

"No… don't send me back… please… _Lestrange_ …"

"Shhh. It's all right. Sleep. You're safe, now."

He didn't want to sleep, he wanted to argue some more, but sleep was taking him over all the same. He let his head fall back with a soft thud onto the pillow, and felt gentle hands straightening his arms and brushing his unruly hair out of his eyes.

_"Sleep."_

* * *

_A friend of a friend of his dad’s has asked him to fix a laptop computer which is so thick and heavy that he’s pretty sure it’s almost as old as he is himself. He has it set up with multiple cables connected, including one to his own, much slimmer laptop, with the aid of several different adaptors that he had to go out and get specially. So far this job is costing a lot more than it’s worth, and there’s always the possibility that he won’t be able to fix it, in which case he’s really in trouble._

_He doesn’t dare say anything to his parents about being short of money, because Alice would fuss and make him go through all his finances to figure out where he’d gone wrong, and Frank would frown and say, for the millionth time, “well, if you had stayed at University…”_

_The screen, which has been scrolling through its code at a steady, beeping pace, suddenly fizzes and goes black. Neville wants to punch his fist through it, but that would only make it even more expensive to fix._

_“Are you done with that thing yet?”_

_A freckled face and a long red ponytail appears around the corner of the bedroom door. Neville spits out the pen he’s been holding in his mouth into his hand. “Just died on me again.”_

_She winces. “Sucks. Does that mean you can’t come? I can drive myself if you’re busy.”_

_“Nah.” Neville shakes his head. “Let me just set it up again and I’ll come; if it dies again while we’re out it won’t have the chance to break my heart.”_

_She giggles, ducks back inside, then comes out pulling her kit top over her sports bra with no modesty whatsoever. The socks she’s wearing were once white, but no amount of washing in their crappy shared launderette could ever bring them back from a kind of muddy grey now. Ginny plays football, because netball is too girly and tennis requires stupid little skirts and good manners, which she would be the first to admit she doesn’t have. “Nervous?” he asks as he waits impatiently for the damn dinosaur to boot up again._

_“Nah. We’ll crush ‘em.” She picks up her bag from where it’s waiting by the door, tugs on her muddy boots, tosses a ball up and down so high that it taps the ceiling._

_He taps a few crucial keys with excruciating slowness. “Ugh, come oonnn,” he sighs, resisting the urge to stab at the spacebar._

_“I can just drive myself, y’know,” she says, catching the ball, looking over at him._

_“I don’t want to miss the game!”_

_“At this rate we’ll both miss it. Anyway you hate sports, remember?”_

_“I like it when you play them.” She rolls her eyes, taps her spikes impatiently on the floor. It takes another five minutes, but finally he gets the thing running code again. “Coming, coming.”_

_They scramble into his 1992 Subaru. They’re running late, but she doesn’t complain, even though this is the most important game of the season, even though she’s the star player and is already on thin ice with the coach. She knows the kind of pressure he’s under, and they need the money from that laptop fix to pay rent on the flat this month. Instead she puts on a CD and sings along, tunelessly, making him laugh as they speed down the highway._

_An hour’s drive for an away game. He doesn’t want her to be late. He presses the pedal a little harder to the floor._

_A flash of light, a screech of tyres. The singing turns to screams as they spin out of control, and then a sound like the end of the world, crashing down._

* * *

The hospital did turn out to be St. Mungos, Neville found out later. Somehow that proved more than anything else that the insane story he had been told was true, and this wasn’t all just an elaborate trick. He knew that in his world, St Mungos had been destroyed in the war. He had seen the ruins. He had seen the piles of bodies in hospital gowns, heaped together like rubbish, and known that his mother and father had been among them. To be sitting in the crisp clean bed now, being treated by Healers who were kind to him as they gave him potions and dressed his wounds and fed him real food, proved beyond doubt that he had to be in a different world entirely. Back home, no healer would touch him without permission from his mistress, and kind words were something he had long ago ceased to expect from anyone.

It took four days to heal the effects of the brutal flogging and stabilise his dizziness to the point where he was allowed to get out of bed. They had to keep the blinds closed for the next three days to get his eyes used to the light, while he tottered around the ward. There were five beds in the ward but no other patients ever came in, only the Healers, and a specialist curse breaker they brought in to look at his wristband. The man poked at the silver bracelet for an hour with his wand before giving up. Well, he didn't give up in so many words, but Neville could have told him from the start that he wouldn't be able to remove it. Those cuffs had been designed by Voldemort himself, and no known spell could remove it. No tool would break or even dent it, paint or dirt would not stick to it. Similarly the words on it could not be changed without a magical contract signed in blood.

He assured the Healers that it didn't hurt him, and they let him alone after that, though it earned him some odd looks when he had to be bathed with it on. He didn't care, though. The bath was glorious. His last one seemed like months ago, and the cleaning charms they must have used on him when he came in were nothing to it. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt so clean.

After the bath, they surprised him by giving him clothes, rather than the hospital pyjamas he had been wearing. The blood-soaked trousers he had been wearing on his arrival had no doubt been burned. The clothes they gave him were a pair of black tracksuit bottoms and a red T-shirt bearing the slogan _Gryffindors Do it Better._ He put it on. It was about three sizes too big for him, but he didn't care

Number One was waiting for him in the room when he came back from washing. Neville hesitated. He hadn't seen any of his other selves since that first day. Hermione had been back, once, to assure him that they wouldn't send him back if he didn't want to go. They would just have to figure out a way to make it work, she had said. Neville wondered how Number One felt about that, another version of him showing up and wanting to share worlds. At least he didn't look angry, now. In fact he looked rather amused. “Hullo Five,” he said amiably, grinning. “That shirt's huge on you. I thought it would be, but it's the smallest one I've got."

"I like it," Neville assured him, stroking it down his chest as though it was precious. In a way, it was. "Thanks."

"No problem,” One shrugged. “The House is right, is it? Number Two and I were both Gryffindors, so I thought you probably were too. Three wasn’t, but who cares about him.” 

Neville didn't blame him for the suddenly grim expression. He didn’t much like to think about Number Three, whose situation sounded like something out of a nightmare and yet he behaved as though _he_ was the one who felt sorry for the rest of them. "I bet he was a Slytherin,” he muttered. 

"Not really a surprise, is it? That guy gives me the creeps, I won't lie to you."

Neville smiled. It was a weird feeling to do so and not get slapped in the face for his tenacity. "Don't we _all_ give you the creeps?" he asked. 

Number One laughed. "Ha. You have no idea. Well… I guess you _do_ , come to that." He shook his head. "Never mind, anyway. You ready to leave this place? Healers reckon you're all done up, just - no marathon running or Quidditch world cups, or anything like that."

Neville's heart sank. He wasn't sure he wanted to leave St. Mungo’s yet. He felt _safe_ here. "Um…"

Number One seemed to sense his anxiety. "Don't worry, mate, I'm coming with you. It's a safe place, I swear."

Neville nodded quickly, before he could change his mind. After all, if he couldn't trust himself, who could he trust? "Okay."

"Okay then. This way. Hermione's organised us a Portkey."

Neville hurried along behind the man. They were the same height, he realised. Exactly the same height… though Number One was obviously a lot more well-fed. He was broad with muscle, and actually filled out his clothes.

It was strange, he thought, that they were all the same person, biologically, yet he already thought of them as quite different people. Two was kind and gentle and could make pain go away with a touch. Three was an ass, obviously. Number One was friendly, matter of fact. _And I'm Five_ , he thought to himself ruefully, as something else occurred to him. 

"What about Four?" he asked as they left the ward and went down the corridor towards the lift.

"Hm?"

"Neville Number Four. If I'm Five, there must be someone I haven't met yet. Was he a Gryffindor? You didn't say."

Number One pressed the button for the lift, and didn't immediately answer. "No," he said after a moment. "He wasn't a Gryffindor."

"Oh. Not another Slytherin?" He held back a shudder.

"No. They didn't have houses where he came from. No Hogwarts."

" _What?_ "

A world without Hogwarts? That seemed truly impossible. Even his own world had Hogwarts. Sure, now it was corrupt and black as hell and anyone with a trace of Muggle blood would be lucky to get within a mile of it, but _still_ …

"He'll tell you. You'll get to know all of them before long, I expect. You been sleeping all right? You look a bit peaky."

This, Neville thought, was a bit of an understatement. “Some weird dreams,” he said, shortly. “I’m okay, though.” 

They went down in the lift to the ground floor. A few people were milling around, but no one looked twice at the pair. Number One did a cursory glance around before leading the way through the waiting room.

It felt weird to be walking through a building that he _knew_ was gone and had been for years. He had mourned its loss. When he was younger, before the war, he had come here every week during the holidays, with his Gran.

Suddenly he stopped, right there in the middle of the waiting room. Number One kept walking for a few steps until he realised he had left his new companion behind. He hurried back. "What's up?" he asked. People were starting to stare. "Come on, we'll miss our Portkey."

"My… mum and dad…" Neville turned wide eyes towards his counterpart. "Are they… here?"

One frowned. There was a long silence. " _My_ mum and dad are here," he said eventually. His voice was gentle, but the emphasis on 'my' was as clear as he could make it. "Were your parents in the hospital, where you come from?"

"No…” Neville shook. “I mean yes, they were… but it was destroyed, in the war, and they were killed, years ago…"

One hesitated a moment before reaching out to put a hand on Neville's shoulder. "I'm sorry," he said, low.

Neville couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it before. He'd been sitting _uselessly_ in that hospital bed for _days_ and hadn't even considered the fact that, in this world, his parents might still be _alive._ They might have been just a few rooms away. Just a few steps. "Can I see -" he started.

"No." One spoke firmly. Neville flinched and tried to pull away from the hand on his shoulder. "No," One repeated, a bit kinder. "I'm sorry… you have to remember, this is _my_ world. They're not _your_ parents. They're mine. I'm not you, and you're not me. Understand? I can’t confuse them by bringing in version after version of me.” 

Neville felt like the floor had been swept out from under him. The whole related worlds concept had been relatively easy to grasp, before. He felt like punishing himself like a House-Elf for not exploring the hospital before. He could have seen them again, just for a minute, and no one would be any the wiser. "Yeah, I get it," he said eventually, unable to stop a hint of resentfulness in his voice.

Number One released his hold on Neville's shoulder, though he seemed less than convinced by this short assent. "Right. Come on then, or we really will miss it." He led them out through the waiting room, where nearly everyone was intrigued by their exit, and into the street. Behind them the hospital doors became the familiar facade of the empty shop window. To Neville it felt like travelling back in time. 

Number One started rummaging around in a nearby dustbin. "Right… must be something in here… I'm guessing something coded like a... aha!" He pulled what looked like a tattered old book from the bin. The pages were falling out and the front cover looked like it had been chewed by rats. "Hold on," One said, holding it out, and Neville grasped a filthy page reluctantly. He wasn’t technically allowed to travel by Portkey, and if he tried it in his own world the silver cuff would probably rip off his arm. He’d already done one unauthorised Apparition though, so probably it’d be okay. Probably. 

"Any minute now." 

They waited for what seemed like only seconds, and then Neville felt a sharp pull at his navel, and the whole world turned briefly upside down and inside out, and then he was standing in a residential street. He let go of the book as though it had scorched him, and One tossed it away. "Thought you might prefer that to Side-Along Apparition, seeing as you passed out the last time," he said. Neville wondered if that was meant to be a joke.

"I think I prefer walking," he said sullenly.

Number One didn't seem to know what to say to this. In the end, he shrugged, and beckoned him towards the nearest house. It certainly stood out on the street. It was very large, much bigger than those to either side, and not nearly as modern. It reminded Neville a bit of Malfoy Manor. He shrank back immediately, his heart suddenly pounding with irrational fear.

"It's _okay_ ," One said, earnestly. His eyes flicked to either end of the street. "This is Harry's house. He doesn't live here right now, obviously… he's leant it to us for a bit while we sort things out. It's got so many protections on it, it's one of the safest places in the wizarding world, after Hogwarts - what is it _now?"_ he sighed, seeing the look on Neville’s face.

Neville had been staring at him, wide-eyed, since the words 'Harry's House'. "Harry's alive?" he said, when he had recovered enough to form words.

One looked like he was about ready to lose his calm exterior. "Of course he's _alive_. You think we'd all be walking around happily in the sunlight if he wasn't…" Suddenly his eyes widened and he trailed off. "Oh. Right. Sorry."

Neville didn't say anything else, but walked past him, down the garden path and up to the house. Number One hurried after him to knock on the door with the butt end of his wand. There was a pause.

"Who is it?" called a voice from inside.

"It's One and Five.” 

After a moment, a familiar face appeared on the other side of the door. It was Two, wearing a green Healer's robe open over the same shirt from the other day, and he was grinning. ”Hullo Five,” he said, giving Neville a weird second of deja vu. 

“Hi,” he replied, nervously. 

“Nice shirt.” 

One rolled his eyes. "Shut up." He nudged Neville, and he quickly stepped over the threshold into the house.

It was quite nice on the inside. The walls were mostly whitewash, but there were curtains and a couple of paintings to add colour. From here he could see through to a nicely-furnished living room.

“Welcome to Grimmauld Place,” said Two, closing the door behind them. “How are you, Five?"

"Much better thanks," Neville said.

"You look it - still need some more food and some sun, though. We can get you started on that first one, at any rate, want some tea?"

Neville nodded eagerly. "Yes please."

They went through to the living room, from which Two went into a nearby kitchen and came out carrying a tray of tea and biscuits. Neville took one quickly, waited to make sure no one was going to take it away from him, and then stuffed it in his mouth. 

"Where are the others?" One asked, accepting his tea with a grateful sigh.

"Four’s in his room, brooding, probably. Three came down earlier and quoted some bloody awful poetry at me."

"I'm sorry."

"Not sure if he was cursing me or just trying to make a point. From the hints, though, I think he might be in love with his cousin."

"What?"

"Adopted cousin, obviously, so maybe it doesn't count. Doesn't mean I need to know about it, though. I have enough problems."

"Don't we all?"

"Speaking of, have you, ah… heard from Hermione, since last time?"

"She'll come tomorrow. We have to do another round of biography speeches."

" _Again_?"

"Introduce the newbie." 

Neville belatedly realised they were talking about him, and looked up. 

"She's gathering the research team," One continued. "At least everyone knows me, so I can do the short version. I'm going to have to get more time off work, though." He ran a hand through his hair and made a face. "I must be the only Auror in the history of the department to continually cite 'inter-dimensional rift' as a reason for sick leave."

Neville swallowed his biscuit. "You're an Auror?"

One nodded. "For now, anyway. At this rate I'm going to become a full-time dimensional chaos-wrangler."

Two grinned at him. They really did look like twins, Neville thought, except that Two was a little plumper. "Maybe you should rethink taking up Professor McGonagall on her offer,” Two chuckled.

Neville felt a twinge. So McGonagall was alive, too. Harry, McGonagall, his parents… how many other ghosts could this world magically conjure up?

"Mate, I think about it every day. Teaching a bunch of kids how to de-pod a Snargaluff stump suddenly seems inviting." Number One put down his teacup. "I better get back. Can you manage things here until tomorrow?"

Two nodded.

"Right. See you later, Five. Any worries you can talk to Two here, he’s in charge."

Neville waved half-heartedly. He had the uneasy feeling that One was probably glad to see the back of him as he left the living room. They heard the front door open and close, and then the sound of Apparition. 

For a while he and Two sat there in silence, sipping their tea. Neville found his gaze wandering around the room, lingering on the doors.

“Something bothering you?” Two asked finally, making him jump. 

“No,” Neville said quickly, then caught himself. “I mean… well, he said this was a safe place, only… it doesn't _seem_ safe."

“What do you mean?” 

"This house. He said it was one of the safest places in the wizarding world… but he just Apparated off the doorstep, and there were no curses or anything on the door…"

“Ah.” Two chuckled. "It's deceptive, I know. But you still have to be let in, you see. There's a truth spell on a mirror by the door, so you can tell if someone lies about who they are. And if we refuse to let someone in, they could be there for weeks and not be able to force their way in. There _used_ to be a Fedelius charm on it as well, but it got complicated once we started showing up. Trust me, it's protected, even if there were anyone trying to find us, which I don't think there is. They're trying to keep us a secret for national security rather than our own safety. Imagine the panic if people heard there was a great Neville-shaped hole between realities." He took a long sip out of his cooling cup, and put it down.

Neville relaxed a little, but not entirely. It just seemed too good to be true that some unknown magical event had landed him safely out of Lestrange and Malfoy's reach forever. He looked down at the silver band on his wrist. There were at least three curses on it, he knew. One was supposed to land him in a magical coma if he so much as took a step outside of the manor without permission. Maybe it just didn't work outside of his own world, but they would definitely have noticed he was gone, by now. Where would they look for him? Would they figure out what had happened? Would someone try and come after him? Lestrange was mad enough to do it, no doubt about that. Could she find a way to come through the Neville-shaped hole? 

"You all right?" Two asked him, and he jumped.

"What? Yeah… fine. Just… thinking about home."

Two gave him an appraising look. Neville suddenly remembered when the man had touched him, before, when the touch had made him feel temporarily better. _Who did this to you?_ he had asked, with sorrow in his eyes. Some of that same sorrow was there again now.

Neville drew back into the sofa and wrapped his arms around his knees. "You don't have to feel sorry for me," he muttered. "I don't need your pity."

"I don't -" Two protested, then shook his head. "I'm sorry. You're right. I would hate it, if it were me." There was a pause. "You don't have to tell me," he added. "We're going to get into it tomorrow anyway, and that'll be stressful enough for you. Still hungry?"

Neville shook his head. As much as the idea of more food was tempting, he knew from experience that too much food after being starved for so long would only lead to his throwing it up again. The Healers had been very careful about feeding him, and had mostly done so with nutritional potions, which made him feel full but didn't exactly excite the tastebuds.

"Right then. Shall we find you a room? Three's room is on the third floor, and we kind of leave him to it. I'm on the second floor and Four is on fourth… we didn’t do it that way on purpose, it just worked out like that. There's plenty more on each, but it's up to you…."

"The higher the better," Neville said quickly. The further he was away from any possible dungeons the place might have, the safer he would feel. Two nodded understandingly, though surely he couldn't guess the actual reason for his choice.

"Come on then."

They went out to the whitewashed hall again, and climbed a wide staircase up to the fourth floor. As they passed it, they could hear banging and swearing coming from the third floor. Two shook his head, wearily. "We took his wand away on the first day," he explained. "He _says_ he wants to get home, and he'll cooperate with us, but frankly no one much trusts him. He's been trying to get the hang of wandless magic ever since then, with varying results. Mostly he just blows things up. Do you have a wand?" He asked the question with an air of politeness that suggested he already knew the answer.

Neville shook his head. "No. Can you do wandless magic?"

"Me? Merlin, no! Can you?"

Neville hesitated for a moment before answering. "Well… I can do a few small things… healing spells mostly. I had to learn… to help people."

Two looked impressed, but Neville did not feel very impressive. "Perhaps I could teach you a few more, while we're - while I'm here," Two said. "You can borrow my wand if you like. Cherry and unicorn hair?"

Neville nodded eagerly. He hadn't seen his wand since they had taken it from him and snapped it, at the end of the war.

"Same as me and One, too. Funny. Right, this is the fourth floor. This one's Four's." He pointed to one of the doors. For a moment Neville thought it was painted a different colour to all the others. Then he looked closer and realised it was scorched black in places. He swallowed nervously, wondering just what he had signed up for here, but Two didn't seem to notice. "If you really want to learn about wandless magic, you can ask him. Just don't get too close." This seemed to be a joke, but Neville wasn't totally sure. He was starting to regret his decision to stay on the floor with the unknown Neville.

In the end, he picked the room on the opposite end of the hallway from the blackened doorway. 

“Bathroom’s there,” Two indicated, pointing. “There should be a spare toothbrush in there - I’ll find you a razor -” 

Neville shook his head. “S’all right.” He held up his wrist, flashing the cuff. “Shaving charm on this.” 

Two blinked. “What on earth for?” 

“No one likes a scruffy slave,” Neville said, without thinking, then added, quickly, “and it’s safer than giving us blades.” 

Two looked momentarily horrified, but seemed to gather himself quickly. He told Neville, with extreme gentleness, to make himself at home. Then went back downstairs. Feeling like a bit of an idiot, Neville went and sat on the bed for a while. He also felt strangely aimless. He wondered what home was supposed to feel like. He hadn't had a home since the war. He'd had cells, bits of floor, cages, and on a rare occasion an actual bed to sleep in, but never a home. This room was nice enough, he thought. The walls were painted a sort of dusky blue. The carpets were clean, the bed was clean, there was even a dresser and an armchair. There was a bookshelf, but it was empty. All in all it was nice, but clearly unlived in. He might have likened it to a hotel room, if he had ever stayed in one. Even the rooms at Hogwarts had had a certain something… a sense of safety. 

He shook his head. It didn't help to think of Hogwarts. Of his four dormitory-mates. Two dead, one definitely enslaved, and one missing, probably in an mass unmarked grave somewhere. He shuddered. Still, being dead was probably better than the alternative.

After a few minutes, he found he couldn't stand it anymore. He had sat in rooms alone for hours, in isolation, sometimes for days, but that had always been because he was locked in, because he had no options. He wasn't just going to sit here by choice, when the door was standing there open and unlocked.

He poked his head out into the corridor. There was no one around. He stepped out and looked up and down the hallway. Most of the doors looked like rooms similar to his own, but he decided to try the bathroom, realising belatedly that he hadn't relieved himself since the hospital that morning.

It was a very nice bathroom, on par with any he had been forced to clean over the last four years. There was a large bath and a modern-looking shower, a toilet, a sink and a full-length mirror. He hesitated, then made himself walk the last few steps to stand in front of it.

As usual, whenever he saw his reflection, it took him a few seconds to associate himself with the image in front of him. The man in the mirror looked very different from the other Nevilles, it was true. He was dangerously thin, with no trace in his face of the roundness he had had all through school. His hair, untended and uncombed, was starting to outgrow the buzz cut they had given him at the market in Diagon Alley, which seemed like a hundred years ago. It was brown, but dull, not rich like Three’s or neatly brushed like Two’s was. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin was ashen white from lack of sun. When he turned his head he could see the ugly black brand at the base of his neck, an old design that marked him as one of the first to be enslaved after the war. It didn't phase him, he was used to it now, but as he reached up a hand to touch it, the light caught off his silver bracelet, and he let his hand fall. Gingerly he turned sideways-on to the mirror and lifted his T-shirt a few inches. After a very brief look, he dropped the shirt and looked away. If his back had been a mess of scar tissue before, there was hardly any clean skin left now. It was frankly a miracle he was still alive.

 _No,_ he reminded himself. _Not a miracle._ Lestrange was keeping him alive deliberately, and she knew what she was doing. Perhaps it wasn't so surprising that he had survived so far.

He dug around in the drawer and found the extra toothbrush Two had mentioned. There was one already standing upright in a cup next to the sink, and a razor too, which looked like it had been used recently. 

After using the facilities, he amused himself by sitting on the floor and turning the bath taps on and off to see what they did. There were a few extra ones, like there had been at the ancient bath in his Gran's house - oh, so many years ago. One spouted pink bubbles, another was water, but tinted slightly azure and smelling very fresh and nice. Another one seemed to be seawater, greenish and salty. He wondered if he could get away with having yet another bath in one day. Of course that would mean taking his shirt off, and the risk of catching another glimpse of himself in the mirror was enough to make him feel slightly ill.

Suddenly he heard a noise outside the bathroom door. Panicking, he reached over and turned the taps off, instinct screaming at him to erase all evidence. The door opened and he shrank back, curling himself small against the edge of the bath.

"Oh. Sorry. I didn't realise anyone was in here."

It was another Neville, and he realised belatedly that he probably should have expected this. This time, Neville saw himself reflected in this new stranger. He was skinnier and paler than the other three; his hair was rather unkempt, and he walked with a slight limp. "You're new," he said, taking a careful step into the room. "Didn’t mean to startle you.” 

Neville realised with humiliation that he was cowering on the floor like a frightened child. Shaking himself angrily, he got to his feet. "I know," he said shortly.

"You must be Five," the new Neville said, looking him up and down with interest. "I heard you were coming. They call me Four. It's one way of telling us apart, I guess. It'll be nice not to be the new boy, any more."

"Thanks," Neville muttered.

"Eh, you'll get used to it. Trust me, you can get used to just about _anything_." Four walked over to the sink and turned the tap to release water into the cup he held in his hand. "Wonder if I should get a bucket," he muttered, apparently to himself. As he moved, Neville saw a thick scar peeking out from under his sleeve. It looked like a burn mark.

"You… weren't at the hospital," Neville said, curiosity overcoming his nerves.

"What?"

"When I first got here… all the others came to the hospital. I was just wondering why you weren’t..."

"Oh. That." Four frowned, then shrugged decisively. "I would have come, but I had a bit of an episode. Told them to leave me behind."

"Er… an episode?"

Four rolled his eyes. "I have sort of an issue. Sounds crazy, I know, but lately when I get angry, things tend to… catch on fire."

Neville's eyes widened. "Seriously?"

"Yep. Ever since I got here. Wherever _here_ is,” he added, with a hint of derision. “Of course the most likely explanation is that it’s all just a construct of my unconscious coma brain, so of course I’d give myself magical powers I have no control over. Classic origin story.” 

Neville was utterly lost. "When… when did you get here?" he asked, grabbing at some concrete information to cling to. 

"A few weeks ago now. It's been getting worse, too.” He sighed. "Come on, I'll show you. You may as well be warned, if you're going to be staying up here with me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story will be posted in 4 parts over 4 weeks!


	2. Number Six

Number Four led Neville back down the hallway towards the blackened doorway. _Things tend to catch on fire,_ he had said, and Neville regarded the door with fresh apprehension. 

"Er… Neville… um… I mean, Four..."

Four looked around. "Yeah?"

He couldn’t help it, the curiosity was nagging. "Er… Number One said… he said that where you come from, they don't have Hogwarts. Is that true?"

“Hogwarts.” Four snorted. “Stupid name for any place, let alone a school. No offense,” he added, apparently without much thought or any awareness of the irritational roll of irritation that had just passed through Neville’s gut. “No, as far as I know there’s no place called Hogwarts. No magic school. No magic, except in films and books. I used to think stuff like that was cool, until all this happened. Course I’m a bit of a nerd.” 

Neville gaped. “You’re kidding. You’re a _Muggle?_ ” 

“If you say so. Never heard of them before I came here.” Four turned away and opened the door to his room. It was a lot like Neville’s own room, but there were black smudges all over the place where little fires had apparently broken out. One was still burning merrily in the corner near the desk. Four went over to it and emptied the glass of water over the flames. The fire hissed angrily, but he stomped on it and it finally went out.

 _Not a Muggle, though,_ Neville thought. Four could clearly do magic _here_ , so it must be true what he said, there was just no magic on his world to use. And no Hogwarts to teach you how to use it. It sounded like a terrible place, and yet… somehow familiar, at the same time. For some reason he found himself picturing a black and white ball bouncing up and down. 

"Er…" he said, regretting more than ever his decision to live on the fourth floor. Children who did accidental magic were unpredictable enough, let alone fully grown adults. "Do you get angry a lot?"

"Recently? Hell yeah. Aren't you angry?"

Neville blinked. "What?"

"Come on. Being dragged away from home, away from your family, friends, everyone… that doesn't piss you off?"

Neville stared blankly back at him. "I don't have any family," he said eventually. "My friends are all dead… mostly. The only people who are going to miss me are the ones who want to kill or torture me. I'm not going back," he added firmly. "Hermione said I don't have to. I don't want to go back, ever."

Four cocked his head to one side, regarding him curiously. Neville realised that he was perhaps the first person in this place who didn't look at him with pity in their eyes. "Who wants to kill and torture you?" he asked.

Neville shrugged. "Who doesn't?"

Four made a face. “You are a dark little figment, aren’t you,” he said. Then he added, “they said you were all covered in blood when you arrived.”

Neville shrugged. "Yeah, I guess."

"I was in a bit of a state, too. Not bloody, but I had burns, and I didn't know where I was. I think I was in shock… I've been ill, see. I was out of control to start with, and then I apparently could suddenly do magic..."

Neville nodded, through truthfully he didn't feel any the wiser.

"Poor Number One. I nearly exploded his bedroom. He's a good bloke, anyway." Four sighed. “Course, I still don’t believe any of this is _real_. My body is actually lying in a hospital bed somewhere, dying slowly. This is all just my dying brain making stuff up to make me feel better. It really could be doing a better job,” he added, bitterly. 

There was something eerily familiar about this, Neville thought, which was strange because he had never even tried to imagine a world without magic before. “I’m pretty sure it’s real,” he said, staring down at one of the burn marks on the bedspread. “At least I know _I’m_ real.” 

“Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Four shrugged. 

Neville sat down with a thump in the scorched armchair. "This is crazy," he moaned, burying his head in his hands. "I can't keep it all straight."

"You get used to it," Four said again, sitting back on the bed and flicking ash off the pillow. “Like I said.”

"But why me, I mean, us? This isn't happening to anyone else, is it? Other versions of other people appearing"

"Don’t think so. Course they hardly ever tell me anything, but Hermione seems to think she has it all figured out.” He rolled his eyes. “That’s a weird choice my brain made, putting her in charge. Do you know Hermione? I mean from… wherever you’re from?” 

Neville nodded. "Yeah, she was my… is my friend." She _could_ still be alive, he reasoned. It was just unlikely.

"Huh. I'd seen her around at home - in my world, whatever - but we weren't best pals, or anything. And she wasn’t a witch, obviously, just a swotty girl who did advanced French and Chemistry and got picked on for showing her knickers in first form gymnastics.” He winced a little. “She's pretty close to Number One in this world, though. At least, they seem tight."

Neville's brain was spinning. "They're not… like… together, you think?" 

"What? Oh no, I don't think so. She's with Ron, Ginny's brother. I think One has a girlfriend, but funnily enough he hasn't introduced her to us." He smiled wryly. “I wonder why.” 

Neville decided Four was definitely the most confusing version of himself. He spoke differently, with a kind of cynical confidence that was sarcastic but not unkind, and the occasional word that seemed to come from another language altogether. He sounded like he was used to taking care of himself, and didn’t know how to process something happening that was so far out of his realm of understanding that it was impossible to believe it could be real.

And the way he said _Ginny's brother_ was odd, too. Neville had always thought of Ginny as Ron's sister, not the other way around.

"Anyway, you look fine now,” Four said now. “You could do with some sun, though."

Neville nodded. "Yeah, I keep hearing that."

Four raised an eyebrow. “Is your world an Ice Planet? You from Hoth?”

Neville blinked. “Huh?” 

“The tan. Or lack thereof. I sit behind a screen all day, what’s your excuse?” 

Neville wasn’t sure how to answer this, since he didn’t really understand the question. "I was… underground," he admitted, finally. "Dunno how long."

“Why -” 

"Hey there."

They both flinched and looked up. Neville relaxed as he saw it was just Number Two looking in at them from the open doorway, but Four was already beating out a flame that had sprung up in his duvet. "Damnit!"

"Good to see the two of you are getting on like a house on fire…" Two said, leaning against the door jamb.

"Oh, that's hilarious," Four muttered. "Don't startle me like that."

"You know, I'm really not a half bad Healer," Two said, modestly. "And I specialise in mind healing. If you'd just let me take a look at you, I'm sure I could help."

"So you've said," Number Four muttered. "And I don't care how good you are, no one is messing around in my poor brain-dead brain, hallucination or no hallucination."

"Fine. Dinner's on the table," Two sighed. "You haven't eaten anything all day."

"All right, sheesh, _dad_." Four scrambled off the bed. "C'mon, Five. Hope you like take-away."

Neville struggled out of the armchair and hurried after them. "Take-away?"

"None of us can cook," Two explained as Four thundered down the stairs ahead of them. "Can you?"

"A bit…" Neville said dubiously. He wasn't sure if heating leftovers in the fireplace counted.

"I lived on my own for a year and never learned to make more than beans on toast. Since then I've relied mostly on House Elves."

Neville stared. "You have House Elves?"

Two snorted. "Well, sort of. My wife has House Elves. Old wizarding family."

"Your wife?"

Two sighed. "Yes, I'm married. And I haven't seen my wife in over a month, so I'd rather not talk about it just now, if you don't mind."

"Oh. Sorry."

Number Three, still wearing his heavy-looking robe and shiny boots, was already seated at the table in the kitchen, eating noodles gingerly off a plate with a silver fork. "I'm getting sick of this food," he complained as they came in.

"No one cares," Four said, rudely, reaching for a cardboard box and ripping it open.

"You eat like an ape," Three told him, watching him dig into the box with chopsticks.

"This is how you're supposed to eat it, your highness," Four said, rolling his eyes. "You should try it."

"If you think I'm going anywhere near that heathen cutlery -"

"Calm down, both of you," Two sighed with the air of a long-suffering parent, taking the remaining two boxes and passing one to Neville. "Here you go."

"You should see him try and eat pizza," Four chuckled. "It's hilarious."

"Animals use their fingers to eat," Three snapped. "How did you all get so uncivilised?"

“How did you get so obnoxious?” 

"I'm sorry about this," Two said, passing Neville a fork, for which he was grateful, as he had never used chopsticks in his life. "I'm sure it's very overwhelming, with all of us… it was bad enough in the beginning when it was just Number One and me."

"I'm okay," Neville lied, poking at the noodles with his fork and somehow manipulating them into his mouth. "It's good!" he said with surprise.

Four chuckled. "I practically grew up on this stuff. Dad loves it." There was a brief, awkward silence while they all stared at him. "Sorry," he mumbled after a while. "I forgot."

"It's all right," Two said politely. "We don't resent you, or anything. You're very lucky to have both your parents around."

“You do?” Neville stared with eyes wide, a sauce-soaked noodle hanging precariously from the corner of his mouth. _No magic_ , he thought, his mind racing. _No magic, no Voldemort. No Lestrange. No St Mungo’s._

"Lucky. Right," Four said darkly, and stabbed his box with his chopsticks in a way that didn’t really invite further questions, even though Neville was bursting with them. With an effort, he kept them to himself.

The rest of the meal was only a little uncomfortable, with Two doing his best to include him in the conversion, though Neville hardly noticed. By the time he had got to the bottom of the box, he was yawning and his head was nodding onto his chest.

"Go to bed," Two said kindly.

"But…" Neville looked at the mess of cardboard boxes and chopsticks all over the table. "I should help clean up…"

"It's take-away, we just throw it all in the bin," Four explained. "Go on, you look like you’re about to pass out."

Even Three grunted agreement. Neville remembered suddenly, that first day back at the hospital, when Three had tried to stop him hurting himself by moving too much. He had taken it as a threat at the time, but now he realised that even the so-called Dark Wizard had actually been trying to help him. He felt some unnamable emotion well up inside him, and he was almost too tired to stop tears coming to his eyes. But he did. "Th-thanks," he managed to say, and fled the kitchen. 

Lying on his bed, later, he realised that no one had said or done a single unkind thing to him in a week, ever since he had come here. Number One was uncompromising when it came to his parents, and Three put on airs, and Four was convinced that they were all figments of his imagination, but no one was unkind. And yet before this week he couldn't remember the last time someone had been kind to him. He felt he didn't deserve kindness. Not when he had lived, and so many others had died.

He lay there, in darkness except for a single fluttering candle that kept the terrors of the dark at bay. He remembered when Harry had died. The way everything had fallen apart in a matter of days. The way they had been rounded up - men, women and children - and marked with the sigil brand, and their names magically engraved into the silver wristband and sold to the highest bidder.

He held up his cuff to the candle and stared at it. _Neville Longbottom_ , it read on one side, and on the other, _Bellatrix Lestrange_. 

* * *

_They give him a baby to hold, to stop him pacing around and making a nuisance of himself. At first he’s confused when they unceremoniously deposit the little bundle on his lap, but then someone says, “this is your daughter,” and he finds himself staring down at her little tiny face, her little tiny hands, the patches of dark curly hair already sprouting from her head. She yawns, and his heart seems to swell to twice its size in his chest._

_There is a lot going on in the next room, people running back and forth, orders snapped between Healers, rags being passed in bowls of dark water. He recognises it all as a heavy pit at the bottom of his stomach; something bad is happening but there’s nothing he can do, only sit here and hold his baby and make sure she’s okay. This, he realises, is what makes the Healers absolute geniuses, because he’s stuck now preserving the little life he’s holding in his arms. He wishes he could help, but it’s been a long time since he did much Healing of the body, and he’s never delivered any babies; he spends his days up to his proverbial elbows in people’s heads, trying to soothe their fear, their anger, their anxieties. Trying to fix things that are intangible. This is Tracey’s place, this manic rush of activity, the buckets of blood and other bodily fluids. Now her coworkers are fighting for her life. He’s lost here, but he holds his daughter and hopes, hopes, hopes until his head pounds._

_It seems like hours until they call him in. She’s on the bed, sleeping. At some point they must have put her in a hospital gown. A nearby chair has been draped over with her wedding dress, bloodstained. He swallows to see it, and balances the baby in one arm so he can pull out his wand, vanish the thing away._

_“Where is he?” he asks._

_The Healer says they took the other baby away, that they need to do some tests, stay here, be here for your wife. Tracey would want him to find their son, but he does as he’s told, finds a seat, holds her hand, murmurs nonsense words. The baby mews; he bounces her in his arm a little. He hopes she isn’t hungry; he can’t feed her. His mind races. They’re so young still, him and Tracey. Now they have two children. Tracey is weak and might not make it through the night._

_What is he going to do if he’s left alone with them?_

_He looks down into the baby’s face. Her little mouth opens into a tiny O. He holds back tears for her sake. Tracey, what am I going to do?_

* * *

When he woke up, there was sunlight streaming through the gap in the curtains. He blinked and pulled the covers over his head. He couldn't remember the last time he'd woken to such brightness. Even the hospital had been dark in the mornings, stuffed into a back alleyway as it was, and the Healers had been careful to make sure it never got too bright for his poor eyes to handle.

Despite having slept through the night, he still felt tired, as though he had not in fact slept at all. _Dreams_ , he thought. He seemed to have them every night now, strangely vivid dreams that faded away from his memory almost as soon as he woke. Exhausting. And now no matter how he tried, he couldn’t get back to sleep again. 

"Oh fine," he muttered to himself, and dragged himself out of bed. He had slept in his underwear, since no one had thought to provide him with pyjamas, and he put on the same clothes from yesterday without caring that they were wrinkled from sitting in a pile on a chair all night.

Then, for lack of anything else to do, he wandered down the hall to the blackened doorway and knocked, gently. 

"Come in.”

Number Four was sitting at a makeshift desk he had made out of the dresser. He had a roll of parchment and he was scribbling intently with a fat charcoal pencil. When Neville came up behind him he saw that he wasn't writing, but drawing. It was a picture of a young girl. 

"How'd you sleep?" Four asked.

Neville ignored the question. "I didn't know you could draw," he said instead.

“I haven’t, since I had to for school," Four said, motioning for him to sit on the bed. "I’m crap at it really. But it's helping. I haven't had a fire all morning."

Neville sat and peered closer at the drawing. It was obviously from memory, and so not very accurate, but there was something familiar about her all the same. She had freckles dusted over her cheeks, a big smile, a long straight ponytail. "Who is it?" he asked eventually, giving up.

"Ginny," Four said without looking up. "My girlfriend."

"Oh." Neville tried to keep his face straight. This guy? And Ginny? Everyone knew Ginny was Harry's girl. Surely it didn't matter what world you were in, even the weirdest possible one where there was no magic at all. "Er… it's very good," he said, for lack of anything else to say.

"Thanks," Four put down the charcoal and stared at the drawing. "You know her too? Where you come from?"

"We went to school together."

"Where is she now, then? Wait - do I want to know?"

Neville hesitated, then shook his head slowly. The truth was, he didn't know what had happened to Ginny. No one did. No one had seen a body, anyway, which meant she was probably a slave somewhere too, but it was impossible to keep track of each other except by word of mouth, and there was so rarely an opportunity to speak to anyone else without being overheard.

Four nodded acceptance, though his eyes were narrowed with sadness. "No offense, but your world sounds like utter shit.” 

Neville had no argument to this. "Pretty much," he said darkly.

Four traced the edge of the drawing with his finger. "I miss her," he said after a long moment. 

"Will she look for you?" Neville asked.

“She’s sick,” Four replied, shortly. “She probably doesn’t even know I’m gone. If I am gone,” he added, a flicker of confusion crossing his face. “Which I’m not.” 

Neville hesitated, not sure what to say. “Sorry,” he managed eventually. “What about… your parents?” 

Neville grimaced. “We haven’t been on great terms for a while,” he sighed. “Dad especially. I started a law degree, ‘cos it was what he wanted, but I couldn’t keep up with it. I wanted to switch to computing but he wouldn’t help me pay for it, so I dropped out. He thinks I’m a layabout. Mum’s disappointed too, even if she doesn’t say. Anyway...” he sighed heavily. “If I _am_ dying, it’s a pretty shite state of affairs to leave things. All my fault, as usual.” 

“Why do you think you’re dying?” Neville asked, but before Four could answer him they both heard, from downstairs, the sound of the front door opening, and voices. 

Four gestured with his head, and they both got up and went to the balcony to look. There were people standing in the hallway below, talking to Number Two who was once again dressed in his Healers’ robe. Neville could see Number One and Hermione amongst them. "Here we go again," Four said, sighing heavily.

"What's happening?" Neville asked nervously.

"Apparently they all show up every time a new one of us arrives," Four explained. "They’d have done it earlier probably, but they were waiting for you to get out of the hospital, I bet. There are more of them here for you than there were for me… oh." He had spotted a redheaded girl coming in behind the rest. "There she is,” he said, sounding breathless. 

"She's not _your_ Ginny," Neville said, even though his own heart was pounding in his chest, watching the new arrivals.

"I know that," Four muttered. "Why does she have to come? It's bad enough…"

"You could ask her for a picture," Neville suggested. "Then you could draw from that."

Four glared at him. "Was that a joke, Five?"

Neville immediately felt guilty. "I… no. Sorry."

"Right, I forgot, you're allergic to humour."

Neville couldn't help but feel a twinge of annoyance at that. What was there to laugh about? It wasn’t as though Four was a beam of sunshine himself. Before he could protest, however, his counterpart was already going down the stairs ahead of him. 

Three was sticking his head out of his room when Neville reached the next floor. Four had already gone way ahead, so Neville waited for him, politely. Three did not look at all pleased at their visitors. "Do we really have to do this every time?" he muttered.

"Is it that bad?" Neville asked, nervously.

"It is for me," Three said flatly. He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "How'd you sleep?"

"People keep asking me that," Neville said absently, walking slowly with him down the stairs.

“Because you look like you haven’t.” 

Neville shrugged. “Weird dreams.” 

“What about?” 

“Not sure. Don’t really remember. I think there was a baby in it.” 

They had reached the bottom of the stairs, and Hermione was hurrying over to them, cutting off the rest of their conversation. "Oh good, Five, you're here. How are you? Do you like the house? It's all right now, but you wouldn't believe what it looked like only a few years ago. Harry practically had it gutted and completely restored. How's your back?"

Neville flushed. "Better, thanks."

"Good, good, come on, I want you to meet - "

Neville froze for a moment. Standing in front of him now were people he knew, people who had _died_ years ago. He’d been half expecting it, but it was one thing to see them from above, at a distance, and another to be looking directly into their faintly-smiling faces. 

He forced himself to remember that they were not _his_ friends, that his friends were actually dead and gone. Still, it was hard to see Harry's green eyes sparkling behind the familiar spectacles, and Ron's shock of red hair over a face full of freckles, without remembering the pain felt by the whole wizarding world when they had been killed. He had not seen it, but Neville had felt their deaths as keenly as if he had. Maybe more, because of the guilt that he hadn’t been there to help. 

"Hi," he said quietly, emotions stinging the corner of his eyes. He was a grown man. He would _not_ cry.

"All right mate," said Ron, making a move as if to clap him on the back. Hermione stopped him just in time.

"Ron!"

"Oh, right.” Ron flushed. “Sorry."

"It's okay." Neville scratched the back of his head. He could sense the two men staring at the brand on his neck - the baggy T-shirt didn't do much to hide it. Made uncomfortable by their stares, he turned to look at the rest of the gathering.

The other people in the hall were only half familiar to him. Ginny, the exception, was being introduced to Four, who looked more uncomfortable than Neville had seen him so far. She looked beautiful, he had to admit, her long red hair vibrant and a big smile on her face as Four shook her hand awkwardly. She caught his eye and waved. He waved back, shyly. 

There were a couple of ordinary-looking, shadowy men staying apart from everyone, and a tall black man he remembered only vaguely from before the war. This man came over to them now, looking very regal in flowing, fiery-red robes.

"Neville, this is Kingsley," Hermione introduced him. "He's our Minister for Magic."

The big man held out a hand, and Neville shook it, nervously. Kingsley offered his hand to all the others as well, which made Neville think it was his first time at one of these meetings as well. 

"Don't look so worried," said Number One. He had just closed the door. "It'll be over before you know it."

"We're just talking though, right?" Neville said, bewildered.

"Were the others making it sound like torture? Yes, it's just talking. There was talk of bringing some Pensieves in and doing it that way, but I know _I'm_ against it, and so are the others."

Neville nodded vigorously. Nothing he remembered well enough to go in a Pensieve would be fun for anyone to experience, least of all _him._

"Right," Hermione said when they were all seated in the living room. It was not really designed for a meeting, but someone had conjured some extra chairs from somewhere. The shadowy-looking men, whom Hermione introduced as being members of the Department of Mysteries who had been helping her with the problem of interdimensional travel, looked very awkward perching on the edges of squashy armchairs. Neville, on the other hand, sank gratefully into one corner of the sofa. A dismal-looking Four came and sat next to him, where, Neville noticed, he had a good view of Ginny. She was sitting on the other sofa with one hand on Harry's knee, and she looked like she was trying not to stare around at the five of them. 

"We all know why we're here," Hermione continued. "Now, we're going to do this more or less the same as last time. By now we know your stories pretty well, except for Number Five, of course, but Ginny and Kingsley haven't heard them from you, so we better start at the beginning…"

"Should I?" Number One asked her, stretching his legs out in front of him.

"Well… perhaps you better, for Five.” 

Neville felt everyone’s eyes on him. He shifted and did his best to look like he was paying attention. 

One cleared his throat. "I'll start then. My name is Neville Longbottom. I grew up in Blackpool with my Gran. I did all seven years at Hogwarts but never took my NEWTs because this pesky war broke out in ‘98 and we all but destroyed the school before exams, and half our teachers were Death Eaters anyway. I started to work for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement after the war, with Harry and Ron here, and I now have an Auror's badge. Things were going great until a couple of months ago when another version of me arrived from another world and suddenly it all got ballsed up." He glanced at Hermione. "Detailed enough?"

She sighed and made a mark on the notebook she was holding. "It'll do for now. If you ever write your autobiography I'd suggest making it a _tad_ longer."

"Whyever would I want to do something like that?" He grinned at her. 

Harry chuckled. Neville flinched. He had almost forgotten the dark-haired man was there. It was unnerving to hear him laugh, quite clearly, not like a ghost at all. 

Number Two leaned forward in his seat. "My name is also Neville Longbottom,” he said, drawing everyone’s attention. He tipped his head towards One - “I grew up in Blackpool with my Gran, as well - we’ve compared notes and most of our first seventeen years or so seem to be roughly the same. In my seventh year I got interested in Healing, so instead of becoming an Auror I did some very rushed training and started an apprenticeship at St Mungo’s.”

Neville's eyes widened with interest. "You did?” he asked. “What were -"

"Neville, please try not to interrupt," Hermione said patiently. "It's easier if we go through the story first, questions at the end."

Neville shut up obediently. 

Two continued his story. "Anyway, they were qualifying people as Healers pretty quickly in those days - more need for them right after the war when so many people were killed - but once things settled down a bit I started specialising in Healing of the mind. It’s one of the most difficult specialties, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

 _Mum and Dad,_ Neville thought. He’d had the same thought often enough growing up - _maybe one day I can do something to make them better…_

“While I was studying I did a brief internship at the Edinborough Wizarding Hospital. I ah… met a girl there." He flushed a little. "Tracey Davis; we were in the same year at school but never really spoke, on account of her being in Slytherin - anyway, a few months later we found out she was pregnant." He took a deep breath, and something in Neville’s mind nagged at him. 

This all sounded very familiar. The accidental pregnancy wasn’t even shocking, though it ought to have been - he was positive that Two hadn’t mentioned children until now. 

"Long story short, we decided we liked each other quite a lot. We were married about… six weeks ago, and she gave birth the same day, to twins. We called them Alice, after my mother, and Lawrence, after Tracey's grandfather.” His face fell a little. “They were really early, the babies, and the birth was… really hard on Trace. I thought we might lose her for a while. She had only just got out of the hospital when I suddenly woke up _here._ "

_The hospital. The wedding dress. The baby in his arms._

Neville stared, his mind racing. He _knew_ this, all of it. He had dreamed it, only last night, and forgotten, but the details were coming back to him now in a kind of rush. Two was speaking with a kind of pain in his voice that Neville hadn’t heard from him before and yet he recognised, as though he felt it in his own heart. 

"We will get you back," Hermione said to him softly. "I promise."

Two nodded, and swallowed, but did not say anything else. 

Neville opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. What was he meant to say? I dreamed about your babies being born? They’d think he was crazy. 

"Do I have to?" Number Three was muttering now.

"Yes," One muttered at him. "Get on with it."

"Oh, for Merlin's - fine, fine, I was just asking." 

Three rolled his fingers through his hair and began. " _My_ name is Neville Lestrange,” he said, in a tone that suggested he knew perfectly well what reaction he would get and was doing his best not to care. 

Neville thought he saw a flicker of distaste across Kingsley's face. Ron looked as though he was sucking a lemon, and Ginny looked suitably shocked. "My mother rules wizarding Britain. I grew up with my parents in a manor house in London. I went to Hogwarts, _and_ did my NEWTs, thank you very much. Some of you were there too, I suppose, but I never talked much to anyone who wasn't in Slytherin."

Ron made an angry grunting noise, and Hermione shot him a warning look.

"Anyway,” Three drawled, “after that, my parents couldn't really decide what to do with me. Most people in our circle join the army after they leave school - my mother's army, that is - but they wouldn't let me, even though my cousin Draco is a captain. So they sent me to Russia instead to learn from this arsehole Karkaroff, who is a _seriously_ Dark wizard. I hated it, but when your mother is Queen, you basically have to do what she says. I got back last year and have been basically sitting on my backside for the last few months waiting for an assignment. Happy?"

Kingsley leaned forward in his seat. He apparently was allowed to interrupt. "Queen?" was his question.

"Well not _literally_ , I suppose," Three sighed. "People call her that, it's like an honorary title. I am called Prince Lestrange. By those who know how to show the proper respect, anyway," he added, shooting Four a dirty look. Four ignored him; he was too busy staring at Ginny while trying to pretend he wasn't.

"And Rodolphus?" Kingsley enquired. “She _is_ still married to Rodolphus Lestrange, hence the name, I imagine? Is he called King?"

"What?” Three laughed. “Merlin, no! My _mother_ rules Wizarding Britain. My father is her advisor."

There was a brief pause, then Harry asked, "Do you know why you were adopted?"

Three glared at him. "Does there have to be a reason?"

"And you never knew your real parents?"

"No. Well, I knew they had to be Purebloods, or my mother would never have taken me in, otherwise. I asked questions when I was younger, I suppose. Mother told me my birth parents had abandoned me -"

"That's a lie," One said, quickly and with some heat. "They would never have done that."

"How do you know?" Three shot back. There was a great anger in his expression. "They're not _your_ parents, as you've made so abundantly clear on numerous occasions. If my - if the Queen hadn't taken me in, I would have starved or frozen to death. And I think I'm done now," he added quickly, forestalling any more questions. "Isn't it about someone else's turn?"

Neville looked around and nudged Four, who shook himself slightly. "Hm? Me?"

Three settled back in his seat, sulkily, and eyes gradually dragged away from him and onto the other sofa, where they were sitting. 

"Oh. Right. Okay." There was a momentary silence, as though Four was gearing himself. Then he began, rolling his eyes. "My name is Neville Longbottom. I’ve never heard of Hogwarts or magic or anything. I went to boarding school - a _normal_ boarding school, and I have friends who look like some of you, but they’re also normal, and so are my parents.” 

Neville saw a couple of the others make annoyed faces at this comment, but he was paying most of his attention to this story, which was, he had to admit, the one he was most interested to hear. 

“I wanted to do a degree in Computer Science - I’ve always been handy with that stuff - but my dad talked me into doing law, like him. He’s a Crown Prosecutor and my mother is a police officer, that’s how they met.” He sighed heavily. “Anyway, I dropped out about a year ago, moved out of home and now I make a sort of living doing freelance computer repairs.” 

_All those wires,_ Neville thought, his heart starting to beat even faster. 

“Ginny…” Four started, making a visible effort not to look the present Ginny in the eyes. “My girlfriend, moved in with me as soon as I got my place set up. Anyway, a couple months ago there was… an accident… I was driving…” 

_Ginny’s smiling face, she’s dancing in her seat, her hair tied back in a ponytail, then a flash of light and a CRASH -_

“When I came to in the hospital she was still in a coma. Still is, for all I know. They aren’t sure… if she’ll ever wake up.” He looked miserable, staring down at his hands balled up in his lap. “When I suddenly got _here_ and people started to talk about magic and other worlds, and they instantly healed all the injuries I got in the accident... I thought I’d either gotten sucked into a video game or I really had died in the car after all.” He sniffed. “Still not convinced I didn’t.” 

There was silence for a long moment. Neville’s mind was racing. One dream might be considered a coincidence, but now there were two. He remembered it clearly now, though there was a lot he hadn’t understood at the time; the computer things, the car, the sports uniform Ginny wore. _In a world with no magic._

He should say something. He had to explain that somehow he had known what Four was going to say before he said it. He opened his mouth to say something again, but four years of training to be neither seen nor heard chose that moment to kick in, and the words died in his throat. At the same time he became gradually aware that people were starting to turn their attention to _him_ , and the realisation that it was now his turn to summarise his own life made his stomach turn and all the dreams go entirely out of his mind. 

Hermione was smiling at him. "It's all right," she said, which didn’t help at all. "Start with your name, and where you're from, and go from there."

"I… my name…" Neville swallowed, hard. He could do this. He had been tortured to within an inch of his life. He had been branded and half-starved for years. He had done things he would rather never recall even to himself, things he had to do to survive. This was just another one of them. He took a very deep breath and tried again. 

"My name is Neville Longbottom," he began. "I… grew up in Blackpool, with my Gran, like One and Two said. I went to Hogwarts… did my NEWTs but I never got to use 'em. There was this war, and… we joined up, most of us. I wanted to do Healing, too, but I got taken prisoner pretty early on. They caught a lot of us before the war ended. Then when it was over they sold us off to the winners. The Purebloods. Most of the Muggles had fled the country by that point, so they needed us - the Muggleborns and the halfbloods and the blood traitors. I’m a Pureblood too, obviously, so they gave me the choice of joining them. I said no.” Shakily he pulled the neck of his borrowed T-shirt aside so they could see the symbol inked there, black and curving. “They gave us all this mark, and later on these -”  
he held up his wrist to show the silver cuff, stuck fast to the skin. “They sold me to a working gang in the countryside; a labour force; I was strong back then. Dean Thomas was there too, for a while - still not sure what happened to him. A lot of people died; they’d starve us, to keep us easy to control, and there was no safety so people were constantly falling off high places or getting crushed by falling materials and stuff. We were building a kind of camp - for the Muggles who were left, I think, not sure. Once that was finished I was sold to an old woman who wanted a manservant. There was hardly any security there, so that time I ran away. I got pretty far, actually, but they had these cuffs by then and they all have tracking spells on them. They caught me but the old woman already had a new slave, so they sold me again, and so on and so on… bounced around house to house for a few years. They all wanted different things. Cleaning, mostly, since House Elves are so rare and slaves are cheaper. I learned how to behave, how to say the right courtesies, how to survive. Some of them would beat us or practice their curses on us, but not all of them were evil. One or two of them even talked to me. That's how I found out about Harry and Ron… how they died. And some of my other friends.”

Everyone was staring at him, he knew, but he didn’t dare make eye contact with anyone. He was already starting to lose his voice, each word trying to stick in his throat as he spoke them.

"Then this rumour started going round. People saying there was a group of rebels in London, trying to gather members of the Order, what was left, trying to free the slaves and gather a new army. They said they were getting help from other countries where You-Know-Who had less power. I convinced my last master to sell me into a market in London; Diagon Alley. They had a good trade going by then. This was about six weeks ago.

“It would have been a brilliant plan,” he sighed. “Except Bellatrix Lestrange happened to be in the market that day, looking for a new plaything. Couldn’t believe her luck when she saw me. The last few weeks were… well, you saw me when I first got here. She likes to thrash me to within an inch of my life and then heal me back up again.” 

Just the very edge of his hearing, Three made a low gasping noise.

“Bloody hell,” Ron breathed. “No wonder you don’t want to go back.” 

Neville coughed; someone handed him a cup of water and he glanced up to see Two looking down at him with terrible pity in his eyes. He looked away quickly and drank the whole thing down almost in one. 

“What happened to everyone else?” Harry asked, looking deathly pale. “What about the rebels?” 

Neville shrugged, suddenly exhausted, his head pounding. “Couldn’t exactly look for them locked up in the dungeon. For all I know it was just a rumour.” He swallowed. “As to everyone else… I saw Hermione once, at the Malfoys’ place. She was in a pretty bad way. Everyone else… either dead or missing.” He shook his head, feeling like he might throw up. “That’s all I know, honestly.” 

“All right, I think that’s enough.” Hermione sat up, looking a little sick herself. “Thank you for telling us, Neville. Perhaps you’d better go and lie down for a bit; you don’t look at all well.” 

Neville nodded.

“C’mon,” Four muttered, and helped him up off the sofa - and he did need the help, he found, as his knees suddenly felt as weak as jelly. Together they stumbled out of the room and, with some difficulty, up the stairs back to Nevile’s room. He was suddenly regretting picking the room on the fourth floor. 

“You might as well nap,” Four shrugged before he went back down, and Neville laid his head on the pillow. “Last time they talked about magical theory and how to travel between worlds for two hours; did my head in. I’ll come get you when it’s time for lunch.” 

* * *

_Harry grabs him and drags him back at the same time as the music box he was about to pick up explodes in a blast that practically throws them both to the other side of the room. His head hits the side of the wall and leaves him spinning._

_Harry swears, not at him, though he probably should have. “You okay?”_

_Neville nods, still feeling dizzy. “Sorry, I’m an idiot.”_

_Harry grimaces. “This place is full of cursed objects. Better call some reinforcements - a lot of cursebreakers, maybe even George, he’s good at this sort of thing.”_

_“Should’ve known the Carrows’ secret hideout’d be all booby trapped,” Neville winces. Alecto was certainly not the sort he could imagine as having a music box, even as a child. Alecto as a child was almost impossible to imagine, however, so he could be wrong._

_It’s taken them years to find the place, and now he’s too disoriented to actually help go through it. Furious with himself, he lets Harry take him back to the Ministry and, from there, he makes his own way to the Leaky Cauldron._

_Hannah’s room is on the top floor at the end; a small room that he supposes technically counts as board, though after growing up in his grandparents’ vast house it always seems tiny and cramped to him. Today though he feels relieved and comforted by it, and finds himself falling asleep on the quilted coverlet before he can realise that she isn’t even there._

_She wakes him later, very concerned. “Neville! People are looking for you, you can’t just go wandering off after you’ve been injured in a magical explosion…”_

_“Sorry,” he says, quite unconcerned, and she holds his face and looks into his eyes and shakes her head._

_“You have a concussion.”_

_“I know. Field medic said I was okay.”_

_“She said you were meant to stay at the Ministry until your Gran could come get you. She’s frantic. Weren’t you listening?”_

_“Oh.” It’s not that he wasn’t listening; he doesn’t remember being told. His head still hurts, and he feels as weak as a baby bird. He thinks miserably that Harry hadn’t fallen for the stupid music box, Harry was a proper Auror who knew what he was doing._

_Hannah gets up and goes to send an owl to Augusta to let her know that her grandson is safe, then she comes back and puts her arms around him. “Silly boy,” she murmurs, and he buries his face in her shoulder, feeling very tired and terribly upset. “You shouldn’t have gone there in the first place.”_

_“But I wanted to,” he says, even though he knows it sounds childish. “For Michael and… for Colin…” Tears come to his eyes, he doesn’t know why he’s suddenly so emotional but he isn’t able to stop himself weeping._

_She kisses him and holds him as he cries and tells him its not his fault, that it was never his fault, and that she loves him._

_“Why?” he asks, in disbelief._

_She smiles, and tells him._

* * *

When Four came to wake him, he still felt very drowsy, but at least he could hold his own weight when he stood up. “Two says it was all too much pressure on you,” Four said, leading him back downstairs. “He got a bit annoyed about it.” 

“He doesn’t have to,” Neville said weakly. “I can handle it.” He was trying to remember the details of the dream, trying not to let them slip away. It had felt like a memory, though it certainly wasn’t anything that had ever happened to _him;_ he had never been blown up by a cursed object, or been an Auror, or even so much as kissed a girl before. When he thought about it he was pretty sure he didn’t want to do any of those things. 

Everyone had gone home except Neville One, who, perhaps in a show of solidarity, had agreed to stay and eat with the rest of them. They were all a little subdued, Neville thought, not just him, picking unenthusiastically at the for-once homemade meal that the Weasleys had brought them. 

“We're no closer than we were a month ago," Two muttered darkly after a minute. The expression on his face was dour.

“At least you understand what they were all on about,” Four pointed out, playing with his fork. “It’s all nonsense to me.” 

“Hermione’s been spirit travelling,” One yawned. “But basically she can only find her way into one world, the one right next to ours, world Nine.” 

“What she _thinks_ is Nine,” Three added, sullenly. “She’s only guessing that this one is One, really.” 

“Well, let’s assume she’s right because she usually is,” Two said quickly, skillfully heading off an argument. “In any case she can spirit travel to world nine -” 

“The one where we’re dead,” Three sniffed. "Lot of good that does."

“The worlds go in reverse, so the next one she should be able to reach is eight,” Two continued, ignoring him. “So we can figure out if any of us are from there, and if we are, how to get us back.” 

“This is going to take _years_ ,” Four muttered, stabbing his roast beef with his fork angrily. “People are going to think I’ve run off, Ginny will think I”ve abandoned her -” 

They all jumped as a pile of coals sparked behind the grate of the fireplace.

"Calm down," Three snapped. "Unless you want to burn up the whole house. Anyway I thought you didn’t believe any of this was real.” 

“Yeah, well.” Four grimaced. “Maybe Hermione’s second lecture about how magic dimensions work is convincing me otherwise. Even my dying brain couldn’t come up with something so totally bonkers and yet utterly boring. If I _have_ been in a coma for six weeks, I think I’d actually rather be dead.” 

The two of them started to bicker, while One and Two looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Meanwhile Neville chewed his own roast beef - which was excellent, as it turned out Molly Weasley was a brilliant cook in every world there was, probably - and blinked as something clicked at the back of his brain. 

“Six weeks,” he thought, and realised he had said it aloud as they all turned to look at him, all the bickering breaking off mid-flow. 

"What?” Three frowned at him, and Neville felt his confidence waver. 

"Oh… nothing, I was just… thinking." Something suddenly made sense, but he wasn’t sure what it was yet or why it mattered. He just knew that it was probably important. 

“Go on,” said One, after a moment. “All ideas welcome here, since no one else is coming up with anything useful. What are you thinking?” 

Neville swallowed. “Um…” He glanced over at Two. "Didn't you say you got married about six weeks ago?" he asked.

Two nodded, slowly, a puzzled look on his face. "I suppose so - and the twins were born the same day… yeah. They'd be six weeks old now. What's your point?"

"Well, I was just thinking…" Neville tried to wrap his brain around his thoughts. Thinking about anything beyond survival was something else he was only just starting to experiment with. Where he came from, thinking too much usually led to horror and despair getting the best of you. But there didn't seem to be any harm in this line of thought - not yet, anyway. "That's a pretty big important thing, getting married. And having children. And so's a… a car accident where you nearly die.” 

Two and Four looked at each other.

"I was just thinking,” Neville said again, working his way through the idea as he spoke. “It was about that long ago when I… when Lestrange bought me, in London. I think so, anyway. And that was important, too. For me. I mean it changed everything."

After a moment’s considered silence, Two sat back in his seat, rubbing his chin. "So you're suggesting that something significant might have happened to each of us at about the same time? And that might have something to do with why we're all here?"

"Well that's very interesting," Four put in. "But it doesn't quite work unless it applies to these guys as well." He motioned with a hand towards One and Three, one at a time. "So? Anything big happen about six weeks ago? Either of you get married recently and didn't tell us?"

One was frowning. “Something did happen to me at work,” he said. “I hadn’t thought it could have anything to do with _this_. It wasn’t… life-threatening.”

“Neither’s getting married,” Four pointed out, just as Neville realised he already knew. 

“Something blew up,” One said, rather shortly. “I hit my head, that’s all. Was off duty for a couple days.” 

That wasn’t it, though, Neville thought privately. The big important thing hadn’t been the explosion, it had been the way he had felt when the girl - Hannah Abbott - had held him, the way he had finally wept, finally grieved for the people he had lost, finally let go of the responsibility that had been weighing him down for years. His head spun a little when he tried to think about _how_ he could possibly know something like that. 

Four meanwhile turned to Number Three, who, Neville realised, had been silent as the grave ever since the subject had been raised. In an almost polar opposite to One's reaction, he had gone quite pale. “What about you then?” Four demanded. “What happened to you?”

Three glared at him. "Nothing," he said after a while, when they had all watched him squirm under their inquisitive gazes until he could no longer stand it. "Nothing happened."

"That's less than convincing," Two said, frowning. "Want to pull another one?"

Three shook his head. He looked over at Neville, with slightly wide eyes. Neville suddenly remembered the noise the other man had made when he had told about Lestrange torturing him. But he must have _known_ his mother tortured people, even if he claimed never to have participated. Still, he was looking at Neville with an expression he could almost recognise as one of his own. Shame, with a hint of fear.

"You have to tell us, if you want to go home," Neville said, as politely as he could manage.

There was a pause, and then Three pushed his plate away and stood up. "I'll find my own way home," he said, stomping away from the table. Four made to get up and stop him - how, Neville wasn't quite sure, since Three was arguably the strongest, physically, out of all of them - but Number One put out a hand.

"Let him go."

"But -"

"Let him go, mate. He's not going to tell us anything he doesn't want to."

* * *

Number Three didn't come out of his room for the rest of the day. Number One went home after lunch, promising to tell Hermione about Neville’s theory as soon as he got a chance, and the rest of them went back to what passed for a routine at Grimmauld Place - Number Four to his own room, and Number Two to the library where he seemed to spend most of his time doing research. Neville wandered around the big house by himself, peeking behind pictures and tapestries to see if he could find any secret passages. Occasionally he had found some while cleaning the houses of his old masters, though they had always made his cuff burn uncomfortably when he tried to go too far down them.

There didn't seem to be any passages at Grimmauld Place, though he found a few spots behind certain tapestries where something else had clearly been for a long time, and something magical, by the way the whitewash that covered every wall in the house wouldn't stick to those areas. Old portraits, he guessed. They had had one at his Gran's house of an ancient relative that had a serious sticking charm on it. Said relative - Neville couldn't remember his name now - had slept most of the time, so no one had really minded. Nearly all the portraits he had encountered in Pureblood houses since the end of the war had been thoroughly unpleasant, much like their descendants, but there didn't seem to be any magical portraits at Number Twelve at all, for all it was clearly a very old house. 

While he wandered, he thought about his idea, and about the dreams. He was certain now that he was somehow dreaming the memories of all the other Nevilles; specifically their memories of what had happened to them at the same time, six weeks ago. What that meant he had no idea, and he didn’t know how to tell them about it either. They might be angry that he was invading their privacy; he knew he would have been horrified to find out that any of the others could view his memories of him and Lestrange. 

Number Two eventually found him to tell him it was time for dinner. Number One had come back to join them, assuring them that Hermione had promised to look into the new theory. When asked why he hadn't waited until the next day to tell them this, he replied grudgingly that his grandmother was visiting and had effectively taken over his flat. This was apparently such an inconvenience - though privately Neville thought that he might have given anything to see his Gran again - that he accepted Two's offer of staying the night at Number 12. Three did not make an appearance at all.

Neville wondered why One didn’t just go stay the night with Hannah, who was almost certainly his girlfriend, but he could hardly _ask_ when he wasn’t supposed to know about Hannah at all. Maybe they were having a fight at the moment, or maybe One just didn’t like lying to her about where he’d been, or maybe she knew about all the other Nevilles and she was upset with him over it. Either way, dinner was an even more somber affair than lunch had been, and they all went up to bed pretty soon after. 

* * *

_He’s lying on a bed. For a moment he has the strange feeling that he is two people at once, and the bed isn’t right, somehow, but then it is just his bed, as it always has been since he can remember. It’s a big room, with a bay window that looks out onto the grounds. He has always liked that window, through which on clear nights he can watch the moon rise. On full moons, he can lie awake and listen to the howl of the werewolves that guard the boundary to the manor house. He finds it strangely comforting._

_It feels strange to be home. He’s been away for nearly a year, and settling back isn’t as easy as he thought it would be. During the day he can pretend to his mother and father and to everyone that nothing has changed, but at night he cannot hide from himself, from the vivid dreams about Karkaroff and the things he’s seen… more than once he has woken up in a cold sweat, with a House Elf or two begging to know if he’s all right. He’s been screaming. He tells them not to tell his mother and hopes they don’t feel so much loyalty to her that they disobey him._

_Someone knocks on the door. He ignores it, but then Draco waltzes in, grey eyes glinting, with no regard for his privacy whatsoever. "What on earth is wrong with you? You were meant to join us for training this morning. What am I meant to tell the Queen?"_

_He grimaces. "Shit. I forgot."_

_"Clearly.” His cousin sighs heavily and leans against the bedpost. “If you want to train for the Army - "_

_He snorts, derisive. "You know I don’t. Mother doesn't even want me training for the Army. She just wants to give me something to do so I stay out of the way." He stands up, stretches. "Want to go out for a bit?"_

_“What?”_

_"Go for a walk… go to a pub… I'll even go flying with you." He hates broomsticks and Draco knows full well, his eyebrows lift. “Just go out for a while.”_

_For a moment his cousin’s expression is vaguely hopeful, then it shuts down, again. "You should really ask your mother about that,” he says carefully._

_"I don't need her permission to leave the house - I'm a fucking adult, Draco -"_

_"You should at least have a guard with you -"_

_"You're a Captain of the Army!"_

_"And the Queen would have my head - quite literally - if anything happened to you," Draco points out, stubborn. Neville is furious; he expects this sort of thing from most people - he is, after all, their Prince - but Draco is family._

_“Fine," he snaps, having lost all enthusiasm now for anything other than fresh air. "I'll ask mother for a guard."_

_"Tomorrow," Draco says. "I have more training this afternoon. Are you coming?"_

_"Nah." He notes the expression of consternation on his cousin's face. "I'll tell Mother. Don't worry about it."_

_He regrets it almost as soon as Draco has left. Perhaps he could go to Malfoy Manor… Cassie is home for the holidays and would probably be overjoyed to see him; he’d like to see if she’s gotten even prettier since the last time he saw her. He wonders, not for the first time, if he really ought to be thinking of her like that; she is his cousin after all, but not actually by blood, and anyway Purebloods marry among each other all the time. He wonders what Draco would think about him wanting to snog his little sister. Not good, probably. Lucius, who has never liked him, would be furious, which is almost reason enough to do it on its own._

_Too much thinking. He gets up, wanders aimlessly down the corridors. There’s no one around; Draco is training his recruits in the ballroom downstairs, and his parents are away on some kind of state business._

_He finds himself suddenly at the entrance to the dungeons. He hasn’t consciously decided to come here, and part of him wishes he hadn’t; the great iron door sends him spinning back to Russia, to Karkaroff and his rows and rows of screaming, stinking cells. The man likes to tear people apart for the fun of it. Neville knows he had not been the student they had all been hoping he would be._

_Without really knowing why he reaches out and puts a hand on the door. Before he knows it he is inside, walking past the doors, peering through the bars. All the cells here are empty; this place hasn’t been used in years, and he knows that, so why is he down here?_

_A House Elf appears suddenly, but he’s so used to this that he barely notices until it starts yammering. "Your Highness!" it squeaks. "Master Prince Lestrange - Master is in the dungeons!"_

_"Well spotted," he mutters. "Bugger off, will you?"_

_The little creature tugs at its ears, its scrunched-up face twisted with contrition. "Master, Giddy is so sorry Master, but My Lady Queen Majesty has said Master Prince Lestrange should not come to the dungeons alone!"_

_"Why not?" Neville frowns, looking around as though he might see some previously undiscovered danger. "It's all empty down here."_

_The House Elf whines. "Please come upstairs, Master Prince Lestrange," it begs, so wretchedly that Neville feels a bit sorry for it. He was practically raised by House Elves, and he has never liked the way they punish themselves for ridiculous reasons._

_Still, he isn't going to let this one stop him going wherever he wants to go in his own house._

_"Tell you what. If I'm not back in twenty minutes, you can come find me and I'll come straight out, I promise. In the meantime, how about you go make me a sandwich? No - a cake. Chocolate. With strawberry icing. And lots of decoration."_

_The Elf stops hitting itself, dazed but relieved. "Giddy will do as Master says!" it squeaks, and vanishes. Neville grins; you just have to know how to talk to them. It helps to give them something complicated to do to distract them for a while._

_After a few minutes of wandering through the empty cells, however, he still has no idea what possessed him to come down here in the first place. It’s dark, damp, depressing. He’s just about to give up and go back, well ahead of his twenty-minute deadline, when he suddenly feels something… well, odd, somewhere in the air to his left. He turns back towards a blank stone wall. He can’t see anything else, but Karkaroff taught him to recognise wards. At least the year of training has paid off in that respect. He doesn’t think this invisible barrier is especially strong. It feels old, old and threadbare._

_He hesitates; surely if his mother has put a ward in the dungeon, there must have been a good reason. On the other hand, the place hasn’t been used for its intended purpose for years. It’s probably an old ward left over from when the place was in regular use. His curiosity burns._

_It only takes five or six spells before he hits on the right one to make the ward shimmer and go out. The stone wall vanishes before his eyes, revealing a dark corridor._

_"Lumos.”_

_His wand illuminates a single cell. It looks empty, but when he saunters up to the bars for a closer look, the wand light reveals something that almost makes him jump out of his skin._ **_There’s someone still in there._ **

_A hunched figure crouching in the far corner, still as a statue, wrapped in a tattered old cloak. There’s bread and water in bowls beside it. He wonders at first if it's just a skeleton; the thought makes him shudder, though by now he’s seen plenty of bodies in much worse condition than bones. He takes a breath and almost chokes - something is definitely living down here, and living in its own filth, by the stench._

_He taps the bars with his wand. “Hello?”_

_It takes a few seconds, another tap on the bars. The figure finally moves, looking up to reveal a gaunt face, made even more hideous by the wand light that left dark shadows in the pits of its eyes and the hollows of its cheeks. It has long, grey hair and a long tangled mess of a beard that disappears beneath the cloak._

_“How long have you been here?” he asks, trying not to breathe._

_The reply comes in a hoarse, choking voice. “What year is it?”_

_He tells him._

_There’s a low, hoarse, death rattle of a breath that sends a fresh shudder up his spine._

_"Twenty years," it says, barely audible even in the otherwise total silence of the dungeon. "Twenty… twenty years." It looks up at him, its terrible eyes meeting his for the first time. Its eyes are shockingly human, terribly sane. He finds himself frozen in place._

_“Who are you?” the man demands._

_He knows he should leave. This is clearly an old war prisoner, one his mother has deemed too important to kill, but dangerous enough to be kept down here ever since she had taken power, behind spelled bars and wards. But he does not leave. He should have said ‘I am Prince Lestrange’, but instead, for some reason he cannot fathom, he says instead, “my name is Neville.”_

_The man makes a choking noise that could have been fear, or anger, or anything. He reaches out through the bars, and Neville stumbles back, turning up his nose at the stink and the wasted remains of the man's arm, chalk-pale and skeletal. He is suddenly terrified and doesn’t know why; he turns to run._

_"No! Don't leave, please…"_

_When he looks back the old man is gesturing through the bars, reaching for him, desperately. "You don't know me," the creature says. "How could you… please… come closer, let me see you."_

_Neville takes a shaking half-step forward, holding his lit wand aloft, but still well out of the reach of that wasted hand. "Who are you?" he asks, dreading the answer._

_The man flinches, a kind of shuddering spasm of the entire body. He draws the hand back and closes the stick-like fingers around one of the bars. The eyes, dark and terrible, transfixed on his. "My name was… is… Frank Longbottom," he said, his hoarse voice echoing eerily around the chamber. "Neville… I'm your father."_

* * *

Neville woke suddenly as if someone had hit him with a stinging hex. His sheets were drenched with sweat. He was back in his own bed, at Grimmauld Place, and he was himself again. He remembered the dream perfectly, vividly; he didn’t think he’d ever forget it. 

It was the middle of the night, but he scrambled out of bed and made his way downstairs to Three’s room. He had to knock several times before Three finally opened the door, looking furious. "What the hell do you think you're -" he began, but Neville interrupted him.

"I know what happened," he said. Three glowered and tried to close the door on him, but Neville stuffed his foot quickly between the door and the jamb. The result was quite a lot of pain in his foot, but pain he was used to; he ignored it. "I dreamed it," he said, shoving his way into the room. "I saw you - and him - in the cells…" The thought of the cells was enough to make him shiver. He knew those cells; he had spent over a month rotting in them himself, before coming here.

Three had stopped trying to throw him out and was instead staring at him, wide-eyed and pale. "You… you dreamed it?” he asked, flabbergasted. “How?"

“I don’t know,” Neville admitted. “But I’ve had dreams about all of you now, and I know they’re real. You found Dad in the dungeons - your real Dad. He's been there the whole time - no wonder you didn’t want to say.” 

Any remaining colour drained from Three’s face. He moved behind Neville and shut the door, hurriedly. “Keep your voice down,” he said, sounding rather desperate; the haughty look was completely gone, and suddenly Neville could see his own resemblance to him as though he were a mirror. He looked terrified. 

“I didn’t _know_ ,” he insisted, stuffing his hands under his armpits. “I swear I didn’t, they never told me -”

“I know you didn’t,” Neville replied, “but what did you do?” He had to know. The dream had ended before he could see what happened next. "Did you let him out?"

Three looked at him, eyes wide. “What?” No, I… why would I do that?” 

Neville stared back, incredulously. "Because he's… because he's your dad!"

"I don't know that for sure," Three said, looking even more desperate. "He could be lying - he could be anyone. And even if it is true… well, my mother always said that my real parents abandoned me. Why should I have anything to do with him?"

"They didn't abandon you!" Neville almost shouted. He couldn't believe his other self was so dense. "Lestrange attacked them, just like she did mine, and Number One’s parents _and_ Number Two’s - except instead of driving them mad, she captured your dad and locked him up! She didn't take you in out of _kindness_ , she kidnapped you!"

There was silence for a minute while they stared at each other. Three looked shocked and Neville was rather shocked at himself; he couldn't remember the last time he’d shouted at anyone, like that. "No," Three said eventually, shaking his head in denial. "That makes no sense - why would she do that?"

"I don't know," Neville sighed. “Did he -” 

He had been about to ask if Frank had said anything about his - that is, Three’s - real mother, but suddenly an terrible, animal _howl_ erupted from somewhere above them. They both looked up, startled.

"What was _that?"_ Neville gasped.

"Werewolf," Three said darkly, without hesitation. Thanks to the dream, Neville didn't need to ask how he knew.

"In the house?" he breathed, his heart pounding. " _How?"_

"Never mind _how_.” Bizarrely, Three no longer looked panicked, as though the prospect of a werewolf rampaging through the house was a significantly less taxing problem than their conversion. “Let's get out of here," he said. 

Neville glanced at the solid-looking door. "Maybe we should stay," he suggested. It seemed safer.

"Werewolves can smell people," Three said. His calmness was unnerving, while Neville’s own stomach felt like it was about to come up through his mouth. "It'll find us. That door won't stop it for long. Come on, hurry."

Reluctantly, Neville followed him out of the room and onto the landing, where Number Two was coming up the stairs from his room on the second floor, dressed in long pyjamas and with his wand in his hand. Neville couldn't help noticing that the wand hand was shaking, slightly. 

"Say, this might be a good time to give me my wand back," Three muttered as they hurried towards him. Another howl echoed from above, coupled with the horrible shrieking sound of claws raking through wood. It sounded like it was just on the next floor - where Four’s room was.

"I don't have it," Two hissed in reply. "How the fuck did it get in? There are all kinds of wards - "

"Give me yours then," Three demanded.

"Are you mad?"

Three glowered at him. "Look, how many times have you fought a werewolf? My mother practically keeps them as pets - I know how to deal with them."

"I'd give it to him if I were you," Neville put in, trying to ignore his own shaking legs. "I dunno about you, but I didn't escape the Lestranges just to get eaten by a werewolf."

Two hesitated a moment longer, but then, with the utmost reluctance, he handed his wand over. Three twirled it between his fingers before gripping the shaft firmly, his features settling into a grim smile. "Right," he said. "Let's go." 

They started up the stairs. Neville would have much rather gone _down_ , towards the street where there would be room to run, but he didn’t want the others to think he was a coward. When they got up to the next floor, however, the only thing that stopped him turning and running back down the stairs again was Two's solid presence over his shoulder. An enormous, hairy, fanged monster was attacking one of the doors at the near end of the corridor, ripping off strips of timber with its claws and tearing out chunks with its teeth. It was so intent on the destruction that it didn't seem to notice the three Nevilles as they carefully ascended the stairs. It was Four’s door, Neville realised, and even though his own room was empty, the next one down was where One was staying for the night, so he was also trapped, unless he chanced to risk running past the creature. 

"No sudden movements," Three whispered. Neville didn't think he could have moved a muscle even if he wanted to. Three started inching forward along the corridor. The creature had its back turned to them, but surely any moment it would turn around, or it would smell or hear them, and if it didn't, it would surely break through the door, and then Number Four would be wolf chow.

"Incendio!" Three yelled suddenly, and the red-hot spell hit the thing in the flanks. It howled in pain and whirled on them, thick saliva dripping over its black lips onto the hall carpet, its claws gouging huge furrows in the floorboards beneath. Three cast the curse again, and it hit the ground just in front of the creature, causing it to scramble back awkwardly as a small fire sprang up between its paws. The path was now clear between the others and the door, but to his shame, Neville still couldn't bring himself to move. Fortunately Two was not quite so cowardly, he hurried forward and pulled the door open, bringing Four out seconds later with a look of utter terror on his face, and they both ran back to the stairs. There were scorch marks on Four’s pyjamas. Three was still casting fire at the thing every time it tried to leap forward, keeping it backed up further down the corridor "Let's go!" Three shouted.

"What about One?" Two yelled back over the creature's anguished growls. "He's in that room!"

Three looked genuinely surprised, and then angry. "Well why didn't you tell me?" He took a half step back and lowered his wand, and in that second the werewolf bounded forward, jaws agape. Neville opened his mouth to scream with horror, but Three raised his wand again almost lazily, in a way that reminded him exactly of Bellatrix Lestrange, and cast fire at the thing's left forelimb. It howled and twisted in the air as Three aimed another curse at it, forcing it back and left until it came up against the open doorway to Four’s room. The curses forced it even further back, and Three's next spell slammed the door and locked it with a heavy thud. Immediately they could hear the thing start to shred the door from the inside.

"Oi, Neville!" Two yelled. "Come out now!"

Number One came out, in a t-shirt and boxers and wand in his hand, grimacing when he saw the state of the door next to his. "Where is it? How the fuck did it get in?" he demanded.

“ _What_ is it?” Four asked, his whole body shaking. 

“It’s a werewolf,” Neville told him, and Four looked for a moment like he might faint. Neville grabbed him to stop him falling down the stairs. 

"And why is _he_ the only one of you holding a wand?" Number One demanded, pointing his own wand at Number Three, who glowered at him.

"You're so welcome," he sneered, with a mocking little bow.

"Don't start fighting now!" Neville called from his safe spot by the bannister. "What do we _do_?"

Three pointed towards the hall window. "Don't have to do anything," he said triumphantly. "Look, sun's rising."

In the distance, an orange glow was starting to illuminate the dusky grey sky as the day began. It took Neville a few moments to realise just what that meant. "Oh," he said stupidly, waiting for his heartbeat to slow down enough for his brain to start working again. Behind them, the growling and wood-tearing gradually faded away.

They all stood panting on the landing, catching their breath. Two ran a hand through his hair, colour returning to his cheeks. "Bloody hell," he breathed. "What the hell is going on? Is it Lupin?"

One shook his head. "Can’t be, he died in the war, years ago."

"Greyback?"

"Also dead, same battle."

There was a very pregnant pause. "Who the hell is it then?" Two demanded.

"One way to find out." Three brandished the borrowed wand, undid his locking spell, and put a hand on the door handle. They all yelled a protest, but it was too late, he was already turning the handle, the door was opening, and the naked man who had been slumped up against the door fell back onto the hall carpet. For a moment there was silence except for one of the faint crackling of one of Four’s accidental fires still burning on the bedspread.

"Shit," Number One breathed. " _Shit_."

"We do always show up near you," Number Two said, wide-eyed.

Neville left poor Four clinging to the bannister and took a shaky step forward to get a closer look. And then another, his heart sinking. The naked man was pale and covered in fresh cuts and scratches, but the face… the face was perfectly recognisable.

There was no doubt about it - there were now six Neville Longbottoms at Number 12 Grimmauld Place.


	3. Number Eight

The new Neville was still unconscious at noon the following day. Number Two, their only healer, had done everything he knew how to do with the resources he had available, but the man only slept on, looking very pale under the crisp white sheets in yet another of the house’s endless bedrooms. Number One had decided it was best not to take him to St Mungo's. 

"They'd treat him," he admitted grudgingly when Two asked if this was because the Healers might refuse to do so. "But they'd have to report it. There's still a lot of tension about werewolves since the war. And if the public finds out about him, they find out about all of you, and that's the last thing we need." 

"You took _me_ to the hospital," Neville pointed out. 

"That was different," One said shortly. “You don’t even look much like me - or you didn’t, a week and a half ago before you started eating properly. Him and me could be twins; I don’t need it getting out that I might be a werewolf.” 

To Neville's surprise, the rest of their little task force - Harry and Hermione included - agreed. "He's just exhausted," Hermione said, after conducting her own examination. "The poor man must have only been bitten recently. You can still see the marks, and they're pretty fresh. It's not uncommon for new wolves to sleep for days after the moon." 

No one bothered to ask how she knew that. 

Neville thought he could guess at the exact date of the bite, although surprisingly Four, when they had the chance to talk, disagreed with him. "Doesn't make sense," he grunted, watching as Two took Three through some basic Healing spells. Two seemed to think that Number Three had proved himself more-or-less trustworthy after saving them all from a werewolf, and was letting him borrow his wand for this little exercise. 

"Gently!" Two admonished, as Three caused a deep gash to open in the large squashy melon they were practicing on. "You would have just made it worse!" 

Three glowered. "This is hard," he complained. "I'm not used to magic that's so… so…" 

"The word you're looking for is _'delicate'_ ," Two told him, with astonishing patience. "Healing magic has to be _gentle_." 

"Why doesn't it make sense?" Neville asked, turning his attention back to Number Four. 

"Cos it hasn't been long enough for two whole full moons," Four said. "That’s how werewolves are meant to work, right? Unless this reality has six weeks between moon cycles for some reason. Poor bastard. And we thought we'd seen the worst of it when _you_ showed up half dead." 

Neville wasn't sure whether to be pleased that he was no longer the most pathetic case, although privately he thought being a werewolf was at least only a problem _some_ of the time. Back in his own world, being a werewolf was practically a ticket to riches and power. He'd heard that Voldemort liked to have them escort him around on full moons. For that reason, perhaps, he found himself a little wary of the new Neville, who predictably had been nicknamed Six. Three’s suggestion of calling him Were-Neville had not been well-received. 

"At least this more or less proves an aspect of your theory, Five" Hermione said, later the same day. She and Number One had stayed for dinner, just in case Six woke up, but he was still unconscious by the time the sun set. "I suspected it before, of course, but this is almost definitive proof." She drew out a roll of parchment on which she had drawn a diagram. It consisted of a single timeline which marked the arrival of each Neville, equally spaced. "There are nine days between each crossing," Hermione explained, and pointed to the gaps with academic enthusiasm. "The same as the number of worlds in our set. And see, here…" Neville looked to see that at the very beginning of the timeline, exactly nine days before Two’s arrival in this world, Hermione had made a mark like a starburst, and written: _The Catalyst._

"Hang on - you _knew_ he'd show up last night?" Number One demanded, incredulously.

"No, of course not," Hermione scoffed. "It was only a theory until now. There were only three sets of data, since we couldn't count Number Two -" 

"Yeah but you _guessed_ ," Three pointed out. "You could have warned us we were about to get attacked by a great slobbering monster - _thanks._ " 

"Well I wasn't to know he would be a werewolf, now was I?" Hermione shot back. "I wonder if the full moon last night was just a coincidence." She bent over the parchment. "I stopped keeping track of them after Lupin… well, it’s not like I know any other werewolves personally…" 

"Till now." Two had appeared in the kitchen doorway. "He's awake." 

* * *

Number Six seemed to take the news that he had been dragged against his will into an alternate dimension quite calmly. His hands were wrapped in bandages where he had scratched himself in his frenzy, and he hugged his knees awkwardly as he listened to Hermione's by-now well-rehearsed speech with hardly a blink of an eyelid. When Hermione asked him tentatively if he could confirm something significant in his life forty-six days ago, he raised an eyebrow at her and pulled up his borrowed shirt sleeve to reveal a deep wound edged with bite marks. It looked like something had taken a chunk out of him, and it was only just now healing. 

"But there wasn't a full moon…" Hermione swallowed. 

Six pulled his sleeve back down, to everyone's relief. "They don't need a full moon to transform anymore," he said darkly, his voice rather hoarse. "I mean… _we_ don’t," he added bitterly, and for the first time they saw a flicker of emotion across his face. "The packs are so big, it makes them so much fucking stronger…" 

"How big?" Four asked, wide-eyed. 

Six shrugged, though it could have been a shudder. "Thousands," he said, swallowing hard. "There aren't - weren't - many of us left that weren't infected. If there’s any upside its that you don’t completely lose your mind when you change, but then some of the beast eventually starts to take over your human self, which is worse. It only takes a few months for people to go dark. I’ve lost a lot of friends that way."

There was silence for a long moment. Neville felt a thrill of horror down his spine. 

"Has anyone noticed how these worlds just keeping getting worse and worse?" Two grimaced. "Bellatrix in power, no magic at all, everyone dead or enslaved, now a bloody werewolf apocalypse?" 

"I suppose you want to stay as well, then," Number One sighed. 

Number Six blinked. "I'm not fucking enthusiastic about going back, if that's what you mean," he said. "If I'm lucky, my friends will put a silver stake through my heart." 

Hermione looked horrified. "But you couldn't help being bitten!" she exclaimed. "You're still a human being… at least, mostly…" 

Six’s lips curled, animalistically. Neville stayed firmly where he was, behind Four. He reasoned he was allowed a little cowardice, considering the man had nearly killed them all less than twenty-four hours ago. "It's about survival," Six said, his voice flat and emotionless. "They can't let wolves into the safe houses. If we let in everyone who got infected, we'd be overrun in a single night, full moon or no full moon." 

"Definitely worse," Four muttered over his shoulder. Neville nodded. His own world _was_ a hell hole, but at least he was still human. Even Three seemed a bit shaken by it, despite his self-proclaimed experience with werewolves.

He and Four retreated back downstairs while the others talked. Neville felt sick, and found himself constantly swallowing, fighting back the urge to vomit. Four looked a bit pale. “This is all getting a bit too bloody real,” he muttered. “Werewolves? What’s next, a dragon?” 

“Aren’t any wild ones in England,” Neville said automatically, and realised after a moment that Four was staring at him. He shrugged. “Sorry.” 

Four groaned and collapsed onto the bed. 

“Four,” Neville said, carefully. “Can I tell you something?” 

Four peeked out from behind his fingers. “Not gonna tell me you’re a vampire or something, are you?” 

Neville smiled faintly. 

“Nah,” Four decided, “you’d be dead by now I reckon what with all the garlic that’s in everything we eat every day. Go on, then.” 

Neville took a breath. “I’ve been having sort of dreams,” he said, in a bit of a rush. “About all of you.” 

Four snorted. “That’s not so surprising. Not much else going on in our lives, in case you hadn’t noticed.” 

“No, I mean…” Neville paused for a moment, trying to work out how to explain. He figured that Four, not being from the wizarding world, was the safest one to tell. Since he didn’t really believe in anything that was happening anyway - or at least, so he said - he could hardly insist that Neville’s dreams were also not real. Neville thought he’d feel better approaching the others once he already had someone on his side. “They’re more like visions, I guess,” he said, trying to approximate what a Muggle’s understanding would be of such things. Four knew about werewolves and vampires, even if he didn’t believe in them, so things like divination couldn’t be too far of a stretch. “But they only happen when I’m asleep.” 

“Prone to those, are you?” Four asked, sardonically as usual. 

Neville shook his head. “I don’t think so. At least, it’s not happened before, that I know of.” 

Four frowned at him, apparently realising at last that he was serious. He sat up. “What kind of visions? About the future?” 

“No, about the past, I think. About all of you - us - about our lives before this happened. In our own worlds. And I think actually it’s about the catalyst. How it was for each of us, I mean.” He saw Four’s expression soften from confusion into interest, and barrelled on, “like, I saw Two and his babies being born - I mean I didn’t _see_ him, I _was_ him. And… your accident,” he added, carefully, keeping an eye on Four’s hands for signs of spontaneous combustion.

Four was staring at him. “You… saw it?” he said, eyes suddenly very wide. 

“More like… experienced it. Like I was looking through your eyes. Before it happened, you were fixing a…. a thingy, a computer thing, and Ginny was bouncing a ball on her foot.” 

Four gasped a little; Neville thought he saw tears for a moment before the man looked away. “Bloody hell. You… and the others? One? Three?” 

Neville nodded. “It was like One told us, he was injured at work. And Three… let’s just say I know why he didn’t want to tell us. I tried to talk to him about it, last night, but then…” 

“The werewolf.” 

Neville nodded, slowly. 

“So Three knows. Not surprised he hasn’t brought it up, if you’ve got something on him. But why haven’t you told anyone else?” 

Neville shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know, really. I don’t know if I ought to. It doesn’t have anything to do with how we got here, or how you get back…”

“How d’you reckon?” Four shook his head. “Could be important, you being able to dream between worlds.” 

“You don’t think the others will hate me?” Neville asked, not daring to look Four in the eyes. “That I’m… invading their privacy, or…” 

Four scoffed. “Tough luck. You didn’t ask for it, did you? Let’s at least tell Hermione before she runs off to read another fifty books or whatever it is she’s doing when she isn’t here.” 

Neville scarcely had time to reluctantly agree before Four was ushering him out of the room and down to where Hermione was, in fact, getting ready to leave. Harry was still there too, looking serious. Four gathered both of them together in one of the small sitting rooms, and made Neville stumble through the whole explanation again while both of the others stared curiously at him and made him stutter with nerves. 

“Fascinating,” Hermione exclaimed when he had finally finished. “You must be a natural spirit traveller. Why on earth wouldn’t you have mentioned this before?” 

“But… no, I don’t think…” Neville stammered, blinking at her. “It’s just dreams, I don’t even know when it’s going to happen, I’m not doing it on purpose…” 

“Well, I’m sure you could if you tried,” she said, brushing off his protests all too easily. “You might not be actually travelling in the present, but looking through a window into the past. It usually takes people months to do even a short spirit trip, so to do it without meaning to you must have some natural ability. Trust me, I’ve read everything there is on the subject - at least everything that’s available in Europe. It’s a lot more common in South America, but they’re remarkably close-mouthed about their methods. This is a stroke of luck.” 

Neville didn’t much see how, but she seemed so excited that he couldn't quite bring himself to argue any further. She had drawn out her notebook and was making frantic scratchings with a ballpoint pen. “Harry, will you stay here tonight?” She asked, without looking up. 

“Why me?” Harry asked, surprised.

“Because I need someone to be here in case something happens..” 

“What do you think’s going to happen?” Four asked, looking suddenly pale. 

“I don’t _think_ anything, but after last night I think we need a little added security around here. The next Neville could be a Death Eater, for all we know.” 

Neville bristled, despite himself, but Harry’s expression barely changed.

“If your maths is right, that won’t happen for another nine days,” Four pointed out, but Harry shrugged.

“It’s fine, I’ll stay. Between Neville - I mean Number One, and I, we should be able to handle anything that comes up.” 

“I’ll figure out a roster later on and get Ron or George to relieve you,” Hermione replied, without looking up from her notes. Five, come with me; we’ve got some work to do.” 

He looked up. “Um, where are we going?” 

The answer was enough to make his throat close up. 

“Hogwarts.” 

* * *

She took him through the Floo, which made him nervous; but he managed only to stumble a little out of the fireplace in the Headmaster’s office. It was thankfully empty, though the portraits on the wall gave them both curious looks. “Library,” Hermione instructed, and Neville found that he didn’t need her to lead him; he knew the way. He looked around with some wonder as they walked, marvelling at how it was all so much the same as he remembered. There were patches of wall here and there that were marked with new stone, areas that had clearly been damaged and had to be repaired, but here was the Charms corridor, here was the one-armed suit of armour, here was the tapestry behind which was a tunnel so steep it was practically a slide, that went all the way down to the second floor. That particular tunnel had saved him more than once when he was late for classes. 

“Five.” 

Hermione had to call him away from staring out of one of the windows, at a beautiful daytime view of the lake. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything so lovely. Startled, he tore his eyes away. “Coming.” 

The halls were eerily quiet, their footsteps echoing, with no distant sound of voices or hooting of owls. “It’s summer holidays,” Hermione explained when he dared to comment on this, as they reached the door to the library. Madam Pince was there, to Neville’s surprise, the one solitary person they had seen. She did not seem surprised when they hurried in, but did raise one eyebrow rather imperiously at him. 

“Good afternoon, Miss Granger.” 

“Hello Madam Pince. I hope you don’t mind -”

“I haven’t moved anything. Books are still on the table.” 

“Thank you; I appreciate you keeping it all organised for me.” 

“Not at all; though it will all have to go back on the shelves when term starts.” 

“Of course.” 

Hermione tugged on Neville’s sleeve, and they moved towards the back of the library, where semi-private tables were set up as study areas. Neville couldn’t help staring around. He didn’t know much of what had happened to Hogwarts in his own world after the war, though he had heard enough to know that it wasn’t good. Most of the books in the library had been confiscated, and some of them burned, particularly histories, which were deemed by The Dark Lord’s regime to be biased. 

And yet here it all was, looking the same as he remembered it.

“Five, come and sit down.” 

Hermione had made her way to the table at the very back, which unlike all the others, which were bare and well dusted, was piled high with heavy books. Most had been marked with brightly coloured slips of paper slipped carefully between the pages, and there was also a pile of parchment covered in Hermione’s neat handwriting. She had picked up one of the books and was flipping through it earnestly. 

“What are we looking for?” Neville asked, blankly. 

“I’m going to guide you through a trance,” she said, head still buried in the book. “If you have a natural ability to see between worlds, you should be able to travel as well; to actually be there - in spirit anyway - not just view the past memories of your other selves.” 

This rather went over Neville’s head, but he nodded slowly anyway. 

“It’s nice and quiet in here,” she said. “Are you comfortable? Would you rather sit on the floor?” 

Neville blinked, shook his head. “No, I’m… fine like this, I think.” 

“All right. Close your eyes.” 

He closed his eyes. 

“Breathe in, slowly… that’s it. Hold it…. Okay let it out - slowly! Try again. In… hold…. And out… that’s it. Keep breathing like that. Now I want you to think these words… _ut ad transitum est inter mundos_...”

Neville dutifully repeated the words in his head, though it felt strange; it was the first time in a long time he had done anything like magic. His Latin must be rusty too, because he was only vaguely sure of what he was saying. 

“All right, now keep thinking those words if you can, and keep breathing. I want you to try and imagine you’re in a kind of crossing place, like an intersection. It looks different for everyone; for me it was like a gigantic library, with lots of shelves to go down. Try and imagine that.” 

Neville tried, but despite sitting in an actual library he found it strangely difficult to visualise. Instead he found himself picturing a kind of clearing, surrounded by trees. It was some sort of forest, bright and sunny and peaceful, the branches of the trees swaying softly overhead. He could almost feel the breeze drifting over his cheeks. 

_“Do you see it?”_ Hermione’s voice sounded somehow faint and far away. When he looked down he could see his borrowed shoes standing on the green grass. 

“I see a forest," he said, and even his own voice was a little echoey in his mind. 

_“Oh, okay. That’s great. Do you see a path, or a choice of paths?”_

Looking around, he saw that there were a number of paths, branching off in all directions. The clearing was only a few feet wide, but somehow the paths seemed innumerable, an impossible number of directions. The paradox of this was so disconcerting that for a moment the whole image flickered and started to fade. 

_“No, no, stay with it. Breathe, Five - I mean Neville, just breathe. I know it’s overwhelming, but it’ll settle if you can hold the trance for long enough. Breathe…”_

He breathed, following the same pattern of a few seconds in, then holding, then out again. The forest around him indeed began to solidify again, getting clearer and more real. When he squinted he could see certain paths were clearer than the rest, standing out from the forest of funhouse mirrors. If he really concentrated, all the others faded slightly away until there were only eight remaining. When he glanced behind him he saw a ninth. That must be his current world, he decided, what Hermione called World One. 

With the forest becoming more and more real around him, to the point where he could feel dirt under his feet, Hermione’s voice became a lot fainter. He could tell she was speaking, but couldn’t for the life of him hear what she was saying. He supposed he was meant to pick one of the paths, one of the other worlds, and go down it. But which one? 

He considered the paths one by one. They all seemed more or less the same, no distinguishing visible features to discern them by. Except for one, the one almost directly opposite him. It wasn’t the way it looked, exactly, but a kind of feeling, as though it were calling to him. He took a few hesitant steps toward it. Was this where he was supposed to go? He touched one of the trees to one side and its branches shifted aside, beckoning. He took a few steps down the path. 

Suddenly the forest was gone; everything was dark, silent. When he looked around, his eyes slowly adjusting, he saw stone walls; familiar stone walls. His heart pounding, he turned to where he knew the door was, the faint square of light coming through the barred window. From beyond it, something screamed. 

* * *

He fell with a crash on the carpet, his chair landing beside him only a split second later. It took him another half a second to realise he was screaming. 

“Neville!” Hermione’s face swam into view, frightened. 

“Sorry,” he gasped, just as Madam Pince hurried around the shelves towards them. 

“What on _earth_ is going on?” 

“It’s all right, Madam Pince - I least I think it’s all right… Neville, are you okay? What happened?” 

He shivered, and retched. A bucket appeared beside him just in time for him to empty his lunch into it. Pince shook her head and magicked it away again when he was done. “Miss Granger, you know the rules about magic in the library…” 

“Yes - I’m sorry - I didn’t expect anything like this. Come on, Five, we better take you home. You look white as a sheet.”

“Sorry Madam Pince,” Nevillle muttered as Hermione helped haul him back to his feet. The woman looked at him with narrowed eyes, and he remembered belatedly that she wasn’t supposed to know who he was. 

Hermione hurried him back up to the Headmaster’s office - Neville wondered vaguely who the Headmaster even _was_ , now - and he stepped reluctantly back into the Floo. When he came through the other side to 12 Grimmauld Place, he almost threw up again. 

“Bloody hell mate, you look like shit,” Number Four said from the kitchen table, where he was sitting with Harry and Number Two. Two got up quickly and came to put Neville’s face between his hands, examining him so hard with his eyes that Neville could almost feel the man’s magic rummaging around in his head. After a moment he felt that cool, calming feeling come over him again, and would have lost control of his legs if Two hadn’t caught him and helped him into a chair. 

“What did you do to him, Hermione?” Harry asked, a bit wide-eyed. 

“I didn’t… I don’t know,” she said, frantic. “He was doing the trance, and then he fell off the chair…” 

“Not your fault,” Neville managed to croak. Someone put a glass of water in front of him and he picked it up gratefully and downed it. It eased the burning sensation in the back of his throat, the acid from vomiting and the rawness from the screaming. “I f-fudged it. Only went and spirit t-travelled back to my own world. I can t-try it again.” 

“Not right now you won’t,” Two said firmly, giving Hermione a stern look over Neville’s shoulder. “You’re done in.” 

“But you did so well,” Hermione put in quickly, forcing an encouraging smile and leaning down to pat his shoulder. “It took me weeks to even complete the trance, let alone actually travel, and even now I just always end up in the same world…” 

“Where we’re dead,” Four said. “We know.” 

“You must be naturally gifted,” she went on, ignoring him, “or maybe it’s because you’ve already travelled between worlds. Maybe I should try it with the others, as well…” 

“No fear,” Four said, looking Neville up and down with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t want to end up like that.” 

“Thanks,” Neville croaked, and even managed a grin. 

“I’ll try it,” Two said. “I’ve at least got experience with metaphysical magic - I should have thought of it before. And if I just end up in my own world, I probably won’t make myself sick.” From the look on his face, Neville knew he’d go there on purpose, if he had the choice - no matter how important it was that they try to find out how to stop and reverse the anomaly. 

“You should go to bed, Five,” Hermione encouraged. “I’d like to talk to you about what you experienced - so we can figure out how to do better next time - but it can wait until you’ve rested.”

* * *

Neville didn’t dream at all, which was a relief - or at least he didn’t remember dreaming on waking. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like the next dream he had very much, and wasn’t in any hurry to have it. 

He went to the bathroom and had a bath, just because he could. He put on some clean clothes that had appeared in his room. Based on the colour of the shirt and the Cannons logo, it had once belonged to Ron Weasley. Weirdly it fit him better than Number One’s clothes did; but then Ron had always been leaner than him in school. 

It was probably dinner time by now, but he didn’t much feel like going straight downstairs and being interrogated by everyone, so instead he wandered down to the first floor and peeked through the door to the room that had been designated to Six. It was close to Two’s, so that he could keep an eye on him. Six was sitting up in bed, with a book on his lap, but he looked up quickly when Neville looked in. 

“Hello.” 

Neville shifted awkwardly into the room, doing his best not to stare. He hadn’t dared get close, earlier, and hadn’t really had a chance to observe the man properly from behind Four’s arm. 

“No need to be nervous. Not enough werewolves here for me to transform outside of a full moon even if I wanted to.” He rolled his eyes. “Small mercies.” 

“Sorry.” 

“Don’t be. I know I could’ve killed any of you last night. Not my fault, technically, but still. If I’d still been home, I might have had more control. Just glad no one got hurt.” 

“‘Cept you,” Neville pointed out, looking pointedly at the bandages on Six’s hands. 

“Fucking stupid, right? Tore myself up as well as the door. Anyone else you could just heal with magic, right? Bloody curse scars. Fucking werewolves.” He huffed a lock of too-long hair out of his face and looked down dejectedly at the book. He was wearing another clearly borrowed T-shirt, but he filled it out a lot better than Neville did; there were hard muscles visible under the sleeves. Although he was recognisably genetically identical to all the rest of them, he looked somehow older than the others, older and grimmer. Now he was close enough, Neville could also see a scar on the side of his face that tugged at the corner of his eye. Stupidly, perhaps, he expected to see something animal in those eyes; a split pupil, a strange colour, something… but when he looked, they were just another perfect mirror reflection of his own. “Sit down, if you’re staying,” Six said, motioning to a nearby chair. 

Neville sat. “You um… feeling any better?” he asked, tentatively. 

“I’m fine. I don’t need to be in bed, but to be honest it’s nice just to sit and do nothing for a few hours.” 

“Oh.” Neville immediately felt bad for imposing. “Sorry…” 

Six waved him off. “Not what I meant - more… back home, there’s never any time to stop and breathe, let alone rest. It’s always where’s the next hunt, how far away is the nearest pack, how many people did we lose today… you can’t ever turn your brain off. Lose focus for a second and you’ll get turned or killed.”

Neville felt a shudder go down his spine. He understood. 

“Can’t remember the last time I just… sat and read something.” Six sighed and closed his book. 

“Any good?” 

“No idea, I don’t think I’ve actually taken any of it in.” He shrugged. “I guess I still can’t really switch off.” He turned slightly and looked at Neville with just as much curiosity as Neville was regarding him. “Which one are you again? I don’t know how I’ll keep you all straight.” 

“I’m Five,” Neville said, flushing a little. It felt strange to introduce himself that way. “I was the last one to get here, before you - ten days ago. But I was in hospital for a week, so I’ve only been _here_ here for a couple days.” He did his best not to fidget while the other man took this in. “So you… fight werewolves?” he asked, unable to help himself. 

Six smirked darkly. “Everyone fights them; everyone who’s left, anyway. It’s fight them or die. I’m a werewolf _hunter._ Or I was.” He grimaced. “Anyway, there’s a difference.” 

Neville stared, darkly fascinated. “You _hunt_ werewolves? And… kill them?” 

“Have to, usually. The ones that have packs, anyway. Lone wolves you can talk to, reason with, find somewhere to lock them up. They can change at any time, remember, and if an Alpha is nearby they can force a change, so they’re always dangerous. And once they join a pack, you’ve lost them. They’re slaves to their Alpha, almost totally mindless.” His expression darkened, if it was possible, even further. “There’s a lot of rival packs now, and they’re fighting each other more than they’re fighting us…” He stopped again. “Fuck, I mean… _them_.” 

“So you’re a…. a lone wolf, then?” 

“Fuck yes. I’ve avoided all packs like the plague ever since it happened. It’s difficult, but I’ve been hunting them - _us_ \- for four years. I’m good at it. So, it’s a matter of locking myself up on full moons - the two I’ve had so far - and avoiding most people, really. I wasn’t kidding when I said my friends might kill me. Locking us up isn’t always foolproof, and it makes us easier for packs to find. And there’s no cure. Better to be put out of your misery.” 

Neville listened with growing horror. “That’s… awful,” he said, fully aware that the word did not in the least capture it. 

Six shrugged heavily. “Could be worse.” 

“I don’t much see how.” 

The man smiled tiredly. “Trust me. Anyway there’s still some hope. The plan was to get as many of the rival packs fighting as possible, and hope they’ll wipe each other out - at least enough so that the Alphas won’t have as much control. I had a way to help, too, even like this,” he waved vaguely at his bitten arm, the wound thankfully covered by his shirt sleeve. “And then _this_ whole between-worlds thing happened. Put a bit of a fucking twist on things.” 

“You can say that again.”

“What about you?” Six yawned, and peered at him again. “What’s your deal?” 

Neville reluctantly gave him a truncated version of the story he had told to an audience only yesterday. It already seemed like a lot longer ago. Six listened intently, and Neville could see the growing look of pity on his face, though privately he felt that for sheer tragedy they could claim equal share.

“It’s definitely dinner time by now,” he said, rather than invite sympathetic words that wouldn’t change anything. “Two’ll be after us any minute to go down. Coming?” 

Six hesitated, but after a moment he got up and followed Neville down the hall to the kitchen. “This place looks different,” he muttered. “Hid here for a while once, with Harry. Remember it being a lot darker.” 

“Amazing what about three tons of whitewash can do, isn’t it?” Harry was sitting on the far end of the kitchen table with a magazine. Neville could just about make out someone in bright coloured robes zooming past the cover on a broom. “Half the time I expect to come back here and see it all melted off the walls.” 

“It’s just a house,” Three muttered from where he was sitting on the opposite side. “Houses can’t actually be evil on their own, y’know.” 

“Shows how much you know,” Harry said, lightly. 

Something dinged. “Three, will you get the potatoes out of the oven?” Two asked. He was busy chopping vegetables but smiled up at them as they came through the doorway. “Thought I’d have a go at making a proper meal for once. No promises it’ll be as good as the Chinese.” 

“Why am I doing this?” Three complained, casually using his wand to levitate the hot tray out of the oven, without even getting up. “This is House Elf work.” 

“The House Elf is busy right now,” Harry said, head still in his magazine. 

“What’s a House Elf?” Four asked, coming through the door behind them. Six looked a bit frazzled, and moved out of the way to make room. It was starting to become a real squeeze around the table now, even though Number One had apparently gone home again. 

“Who do you think’s been doing all your washing?” Three sniggered. 

Neville sat down amid the banter, smiling faintly. He hadn’t even been in the house two full days, and it already felt strangely safe and familiar. Like a proper home. With the weirdest collection of roommates ever, he reminded himself, but even that was comforting. For a moment, he had the treacherous thought that he didn’t want things to change. He didn’t want them to leave. He regretted it almost right away; some of them had families to go back to, and he had no right to wish them into staying. At least he hadn’t said anything out loud. 

“Hermione’s gone,” Two said as he put the plates down beside him, jostling him unwittingly out of his reverie. “She said to tell you she’ll be back tomorrow, and you can talk about what happened. 

“Did you try?” Neville asked, suddenly remembering. “The trance, I mean?” 

“I did.” Two made a face. “Nothing happened for me and I sat there with her breathing for an hour. Turns out I’m really only suited for poking around in other people’s brains.” He motioned with his fork across the table. “The others tried it too.” 

“You did?” Neville looked around, surprised. 

Three shrugged, somehow managing to still look smug. “It made me dizzy. And I was bored.” 

“You gave up after five minutes,” Four shot back. 

“It was more like _ten,_ and you didn’t last much longer,” Three snapped at him.

“I’ve never used magic before, no one actually expected _me_ to do it. _You’re_ meant to be a magic _prince_ -” 

“So, that doesn’t mean I can automatically just do everything, that’s a totally different kind of magic, not that you’d know -” 

“Is it always like this?” Six asked in a low rumble, looking between them with a rather baffled look on his face. 

“Yes,” most of them said, together. Neville couldn’t help a little chuckle, at which Four rolled his eyes and turned his attention to his plate. The bickering gave way to a more polite if somewhat jostling conversation. 

The dinner wasn’t half bad, and to Neville it was just as much of a feast as anything else he’d eaten since he’d arrived here, though Three complained in an undertone that the potatoes weren’t crispy enough. By the end of it most of them were yawning, but Neville felt oddly energised. They said goodnight and split up to go to bed, Harry going around to check the wards and doors before retreating down the hall to a room that was apparently reserved for him when he stayed at Number 12. 

Neville went to bed as well, but he found he wasn’t tired at all. It might have been because he’d slept through most of the afternoon, but his mind refused to settle. He kept picturing the forest glade, the many paths stretching away through the trees. How was he going to know which one to go down? He wondered where he would end up in each world, if he managed to find the right one. In world five he had ended up in Lestrange’s dungeon room, the last place he remembered before he had been pulled through to here. If he went through to say, World Two, would he go to the last place Neville Two had been? What about World Nine? And did it work the same way for all spirit travellers, or just people whose counterparts were being gathered up like this? 

As he lay there, thinking these thoughts in the dark quiet of his room, the image of the forest glad became clearer and clearer in his mind, until he could hear the rustling of leaves and smell the slightly damp earth. He breathed wonderfully clean air in through his nostrils. When he looked down, his bare feet were making a faint impression in the grass. He was still wearing his pyjamas, but it was daylight here in the forest. It took a little while to realise he wasn’t just imagining anymore. He had gone to the place between worlds, even though he couldn’t remember thinking the incantation.

He looked around at the paths, focusing on the ones that came clearest. Well, he was here now, might as well try to actually go somewhere. 

Nine paths. 

The one behind him was World One, he thought, reciting in his mind as though from a textbook. If they went in sequence, and Hermione was right about the Nevilles coming through in order, he could work out which paths went where based on their position. He knew the path directly across was to World Five, but that didn’t help - it would be the same no matter which way he counted. The only way to find out was to try another path. 

If they went clockwise, the path to his right was world nine. If it was anticlockwise, it was Neville Two’s world, where his wife and children were. This seemed like a worthwhile experiment. 

He went down the path. Even though he was barefoot, either the forest floor or he himself was just unreal enough that it wasn’t painful or even uncomfortable, like walking in a dream. He found himself enjoying the walk, the open air, a kind of freedom he hadn’t experienced in years. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d walked outside in the open, with no restraints and no walls. He was enjoying it so much he hardly noticed that the walk was lasting much longer than it had before. After about an hour he slowed and looked around. He didn’t seem to have gone anywhere, though perhaps the forest was darker now, as though he’d walked from day into night. The canopy above was very thick, and somehow familiar. 

“Hello?” 

A faint echo, a fluttering of what he hoped was wings. Otherwise, silence. He had a feeling he wasn’t in the Place Between, anymore. 

“Great,” he muttered, turning around on the spot. The path had dwindled to little more than an animal track, and he had the feeling that if he went any further he’d get lost, and not be able to find his way back again. Plus a real forest meant real animals, and possibly real dangers, even if he wasn’t totally real here himself. Sighing, he turned and started to trudge back the way he had come. After a minute or two however, everything around him faded away, and he found himself lying back in bed in his room. 

He sat up, feeling around to reassure himself that he was back in the real world. He might have been gone for some time, as it was much darker now as it had been when he had closed his eyes. Satisfied but confused, he rolled over and hoped, this time, he could actually fall asleep properly. 

* * *

_“Constant vigilance!”_

_He doesn’t even jump. He’s pretty pleased about that. “Alastor,” he says, calmly._

_Moody grunts, apparently annoyed that his attempt at startling him hasn’t gone as planned, and creaks into a sitting position beside him. He looks critically at the small pile of arrows growing at Neville’s feet. They’re tipped with silver. “Multitasking, eh?” he growls, disapproving._

_Neville finishes tipping the latest arrow and adds it to the pile. His bow is leaning against his knee, within easy reach. He’s not an expert marksman by any means, but even an inaccurate silver arrow is a better defence against a werewolf than a perfectly aimed spell. “Saw you coming, didn’t I?” he says lightly, but doesn’t pick up another. “It’s been quiet.”_

_“Aye, too quiet.” Moody’s eye swivels in its socket, seeing better than Neville can through the darkness. “I don’t like it.”_

_“You never like anything. Did you meet her? The woman from Lavender’s pack?”_

_“Met her, aye. She looked like she would have liked to get a lick of me.”_

_Neville makes a face, disturbed by that mental picture. “What did she_ **_say_** , _Alastor? Are they with us?”_

_“They ain’t with Greyback, so that’s summat. She was right nervous. Got the feelin’ they’d rather get rid of us than team up with us. But she says they’ll consider a truce, providin’ we steer clear o’ their territory.”_

_He grins. “I knew it. This could work, you know. The sooner they all go to war with each other, the sooner we can slip through the cracks. I think we can count on Lavender.”_

_“You trust that black-eyed bitch too much,” Moody says, like a punch to the gut. “Pretty girl with a pretty name, who’d rip your throat out the second she saw you.”_

_“Lavender’s smart. She’s resisted Greyback longer than anyone else. She has the second biggest fucking pack in the country.”_

_“Exactly; she’s just as deadly as the rest of them, and you’d do well to remember it, boy.”_

_Neville sighs and shakes his head. They’ve had this argument a dozen times, which was why he had sent Moody to deal with the emissary, so he could see for himself that hope wasn’t entirely lost. They are two of very few hunters left, and he can’t blame the man for his suspicion. Very few if any newly-bitten wolves can resist the urge to join a pack once they are turned. Fewer still have the fortitude and charisma to start one of their own. But the human threat is so negligible now that he thinks he can believe Lavender’s need to take down Greyback enough that she might consider joining forces. There might just be something left of the girl he had known, after all._

_There’s a sound, not too close but not far enough away for comfort, either. Neville grabs his bow and gets up quickly, sighting along it. “Hear that?” he whispered._

_Moody is halfway to his feet when the black shape launches itself out of the darkness. Neville looses the arrow; he hears the thud of it hitting flesh, but it's already too late. The beast already has its jaws in Moody’s throat - it rolls away whining and dripping blood from its lips._

_Later, he’ll regret the split second he stands staring in horror at the sight of Moody bleeding away his last few seconds of life, his mouth moving in a silent word. Only a fraction of a second, but a second too long. Moody’s eye swivels back into his head, juddering like a broken toy._

_He runs, runs away into the dark. Safety isn’t far away, but he can’t lead it there, to the others. He runs away from the safehouse, down the abandoned street, past abandoned, cleared-out houses and cars with their doors and boots hanging open where they’ve been raided._

_The wolf is injured but not killed, it follows him, and he has not had time to grab his arrows. He throws the bow aside, useless, and keeps running, even though he knows he cannot outrun it. He can’t hide either; it will sniff him out. His only chance is something climbable, something that leads to higher ground. There’s no full moon, which means the beast can change its form at will, to follow him wherever he goes… but that will take time, time he can use to get away. He could apparate, but then it will follow his scent back to the safe house. There are children there. Better just to let it kill him._

_Here’s a pole with telegraph wires hanging loosely from it. Risky, but better than nothing, and he can jump to a nearby roof from the top of it. He pulls his wand, uses it to make rough, rapid handholds. He hates heights, but he climbs anyway, muscles straining with his own bodyweight but holding. He’s fitter than he’s ever been in his life. He has to be, or he’d be dead already._

_He makes it to the top of the pole, leaps to the roof. A quick glance shows the wolf hurtling around the end of the street towards him, sniffing - it doesn’t see him. He starts to turn, looking around to work out his next move._

_“There you are, hunter.”_

_Heart pounding, he looks to his left. A tall, black man stands there, and on either side of him two other men are in mid-change, fingers curling to claws, spine curling and cracking as their bodies contort into a new, terrible shape._

_“Dean?” he breathes._

_Dean’s teeth gleam white in his dark face; they look too white, too long and too sharp. “Neville. Good to see you.”_

_“You were waiting for me.”_

_“You came almost in a straight line. It’s actually impressive.”_

_“Dean -”_

_“We heard your people have been cosying up to Lavender and her pack of beta bitches. You can imagine how Fenrir feels about that.”_

_Neville glares at him. He’s already dead anyway, there’s no point in being polite. “I don’t much care how your daddy feels about anything.”_

_Dean’s eyes narrow. “Where are the rest of you?”_

_“Fuck you, Thomas.”_

_“Somehow I thought you’d say that.” He waves forward one of the wolves, its change complete. “That’s okay. When you wake up tomorrow you can come and tell us. We might not even kill you - we could use someone with your skills.” The wolf beside him whines in disappointment._

_Neville sneers at him. “If you think I’m joining your fucking pack you’ve got another - ”_

_Dean makes a rapid hand motion, and the wolf leaps forward towards him. He tries to duck, but the thing is supernaturally fast; sparks fly from his wand and do nothing, even when he tries to aim them in the wolf’s eyes. He yells in pain as teeth rip through his arm, and then again at what follows; it feels like acid is being poured into the wound as the infected saliva burns into his blood._

_Fuck._

_“Leave him,” Dean snaps, before the wolf can lose control and rip Neville’s throat out. “He’ll come to us now. And if he doesn’t… then you can kill him.” He grins, and turns away, and the last thing Neville sees before the pain takes him is his old friend’s shoulders splitting under his robes, and the three wolves leaping away off the edge of the roof._

* * *

“You okay?” Three asked, at breakfast. Neville looked up in surprise from his cereal. “What?” the man said, when Neville only stared at him. “You look like you didn’t sleep at all again, that’s all.” 

“Did you dream?” asked Four, looking over with interest. 

Neville shrugged. “I’d rather not talk about it.” 

There was an awkward silence for a while as they all glanced around at each other. Three looked particularly uncomfortable for a moment until he reinterested himself in his own breakfast. 

“People coming over today,” Two yawned. Harry had left early, apparently to go to work, so it was just the five of them, Number One having stayed at at his own place overnight. “The Department of Mysteries people. They’ll want to talk to Six, but we shouldn’t have to all go through our own stories again - thank Merlin. That’d be the fifth time for me.” 

Neville nodded gratefully - he’d been dreading that himself. 

“Hermione’s going to come and work with you on the trance again instead,” Two went on, looking at him. “Think you’re up for it? You really do look tired - I’ll ask her to bring some pepperup potions.” 

“I’m okay,” Neville said, but he yawned halfway through. “Actually I did the trance again last night.” 

“You were meant to be resting.” Two managed to look somehow both hopeful and disapproving at the same time. Everyone else had paused with food halfway to their mouths. 

“I didn’t mean to, I just sort of fell into it. Anyway I didn’t get anywhere. Well, I did, but it wasn’t helpful. I think I might’ve gone to World Nine.” 

“What makes you think that?” Three asked, while Six blinked and looked like he was trying to catch up. 

“I don’t know.” Neville paused, frowning. Why _did_ he assume that was where he had gone? “I think I might have…. dreamed about it, before. It felt familiar.” 

He remembered a moment, in the split second before waking in that terrible confusing time in Number One’s flat, the first day he’d arrived, when he hadn’t been sure what was a dream or what was imagined, or what was real. He’d been running through a forest, but not away from anything, like the dream from last night. Towards something. Something terrible. And then --

“I might have dreamed about Nine, dying,” he said aloud. “There was a green light.” 

Silence again. 

“That’s fucked up,” Six muttered after a moment. 

“You have a foul mouth, you know that?” Two scolded him, making Four snigger nervously into his cornflakes. 

“So? Gran’s been dead four years, she’s not gonna wash my mouth out with soap.” 

Two’s face paled a little, his lips parted in shock. “I… sorry.” 

Six shrugged it off. “Just saying. Swearing helps me deal with the constant threat of fucking death hanging overhead. It’s not personal, or anything.” 

* * *

“I thought we could all try, this time,” Hermione said, once they’d all listened to Six tell the story of his bite to the Department of Mysteries people. They’d interrogated him a bit about the timeline, confirming the ability of World Six werewolves to transform outside of a full moon, and left. Neville hadn’t really been listening, since he’d already dreamed about it and didn’t much want to have to relive it in his head. His sleep after that had not at all been restful, and the potion Hermione gave him only slightly helped. He kept feeling like he was drifting off. 

“I’m terrible at this,” Four sighed as they made a seven-person circle on various pieces of furniture around the living room - Hermione had brought Number One with her as well. Neville found a squashy armchair and waited while the others got comfortable; Six messed around with one end of a sofa before giving up and sitting on the floor instead with his back leaning against it. 

“No one’s expecting you to be an expert,” Hermione replied, patiently, sitting with her book on her knees. “The more of us who try, the more chance there is of us finding a way to travel to other worlds consistently. Five?” 

“Ready,” Neville said, his eyes already closed. As Hermione started explaining about breathing and thinking the incantation, he turned off his own ears and listened instead to the sound of his own heartbeat. When he opened his eyes again, he was in the glade. It was surprisingly easy.

Here was World One. Directly across, World Five. To his right, World Nine. He briefly wondered why they were backwards, but you couldn’t really expect things like the Place Between to make sense. Anyway it was a circle, it probably didn’t matter which way you counted. 

With more confidence than he probably ought to have had, he stepped past the path to World Nine and stopped at the next one. If he was right, this was World Eight. If Four was right about the worlds getting progressively worse, then this place was probably pretty hellish. Then again, there were only two worlds left that still had only their own Nevilles in them. It had to be worth a look. 

He had a brief look over his shoulder, just in case any of the others had managed to follow him, but he was alone. Taking a deep breath, he turned and started marching down the path. 

* * *

_Neville sits at his desk, in his office, perusing the latest draft of a treatise he’s been working on. It's not every day he regrets taking on post-graduate work in theoretical and applied magic, but sometimes even his own prose starts to grate at him. It’s ironic, really - no one ever expected him to become an academic, least of all him, and there’s a part of him that would still rather be puttering around in a patch of dirt, somewhere. Maybe later he’ll go and pick some strawberries; that ought to make Luna happy. She likes the imperfect ones, so he’s been growing some in deliberately funny shapes, to make her laugh._

_Suddenly, as he turns a page, he realises he is not quite himself - at least, not_ ** _all_** _himself._

 _“Peculiar,” he says aloud. He settles back into his seat, and closes his eyes. He’s quite well attuned to his own soul, having spent the last few years studying it in great detail, and it becomes clear quite soon that his body is now inhabiting_ **_two_ ** _souls, each almost identical to the other. Fortunately it’s only the work of a moment to seperate them, and then he’s staring across a few feet at himself, looking skinny and puzzled and quite transparent. He probably wouldn’t even be visible to the naked eye._

_“Hullo!” he exclaims, reaching immediately for some parchment to make notes._

_Neville Five meanwhile is for the first time aware of himself in a dream - a trance, he reminds himself, staring openly at this new Neville sitting behind the desk. The man looks quite a bit plumper than any of the others he’s met so far, and is wearing quite fine blue robes with gold trimming; very fancy. There’s a slight crinkle between his eyes that gives the impression he really ought to be wearing spectacles, but he isn’t. “Fascinating,” this new Neville mutters, scribbling furiously before looking up at him. “World Five, isn’t it? Unless you’ve come across from some other series?”_

_Neville stares at him, bewildered. “You can see me?” he asks, finally, though clearly the man is looking right at him._

_“Ah.” The new Neville nods, sympathetically. “First time spirit travelling in World Eight? You might find things a little different here; not as many wands, for example. People here learn to get to know the natural magic within ourselves, which makes one rather sensitive to extra spirits wandering around. And of course I’ve done a particular study when it comes to the related worlds, so you’ve lucked out there.” He rubs his chin. “Does this visitation have anything to do with the current anomaly that appears to be coalescing across the series? I did observe that it seemed to be focused around me in particular, but to actually say so aloud would probably be considered extremely self-important; I wouldn’t want people to think I was getting airs. Take a seat, take a seat,” he adds, waving the end of his quill towards a nearby armchair._

_Tentatively, Neville sits in it. For some reason he’s afraid that he might just go right through it, but after a brief moment where the chair seems to be deciding whether he’s real or not, it feels quite solid under him. “Interesting,” Number Eight murmurs, watching him. “You seem to be quite gifted, for someone not from here. Particularly for someone from World Five, which seems to have reverted back to the middle ages both morally and intellectually.” He makes a huffing, distasteful sort of noise. Neville decides not to take this personally._

_Eight rolls back his parchment and dips his quill again, and as he does so Neville notices for the first time that the man’s left hand appears to have been dipped in gold. Eight sees him looking and chuckles, waving the hand stiffly. The fingers do not quite move naturally._

_“Bit of an accident with an experimental potion, about three months ago,” he says, as jovially as though he was discussing some singed eyebrows. “Lost the hand entirely, but fortunately I know a couple of excellent enchanters who were able to make me a new one. I can’t brew nearly as well with it, which is a tad inconvenient, but I imagine I’ll get used to it before long.”_

_“The catalyst,” Neville says aloud, unable to keep from staring._

_For the first time Eight looks just as puzzled as Neville feels. He clears his throat, adjusts his position on his quill. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?” he suggests._

_Haltingly, with many ums and ahs and pauses while he tries to find the right words, Neville explains about waking up in a different world - a world which Eight soon decides must be what he also calls World One - and everything that has happened since. “I really don’t know what I’m doing,” he says finally, “but Hermione thought I might as well try, since whatever’s gone wrong is all about me - I mean, us,” he adds, looking around at the strange office with what look like star charts on the walls, but charts of some other place entirely, and odd diagrams and strange bronze and silver instruments on the shelves._

_“Fascinating,” Eight says again. He asks Neville to reproduce Hermione’s diagram, but when Neville picks up the quill, or tries to, his hand goes right through it. “Concentrate,” the man says, not unkindly. “It takes a bit of effort to control solid matter in the spirit world, but you’re doing remarkably well so far, considering you’ve had no training. A bit of practice and it’ll almost be like you’re actually here.”_

_Neville concentrates on holding the quill. It takes several minutes with Eight coaxing him along, but eventually he manages to messily scribble out the line marked with each arrival every nine days following the original event - the catalyst. “Was that the day you lost your hand?” he asks, pointing. The quill drops through his hand again, but he doesn’t bother to try and pick it back up._

_“Do you know, I do believe it was,” the man says, frowning for a moment as though counting backwards in his head. “I must say it’s a very interesting theory; an interdimensional anomaly that triggers first a series of major turning points simultaneously for the related souls of one individual, and then the transportation of each of those individuals one by one to the end of the series, like an expanding tunnel…”_

_“A... Neville-shaped hole in reality,” says Neville, remembering what Two had said._

_Eight chuckles. “Yes, that’s a rather quaint way of putting it,” he agrees._

_Neville thinks that Six, Four, Three and One - and maybe even Two, who has always seemed quite unflappable, would have disliked Eight and the way he speaks as though he is somehow more evolved than any of his counterparts, like an eighty year old man in a twenty year old’s body, but Neville himself doesn’t mind, and he finds that he trusts the other man quite implicitly. “Do you understand what’s going on?” he asks. “Is there anything we can do to stop it? We need to find a way to send everyone back - except me,” he adds, quickly. “And maybe Six, too.”_

_Eight looks at him sympathetically, a bit of a twinkle in his eye that reminds Neville of no one else more than Dumbledore - funny, because he knows for a fact that this man is his exact same age, and he doesn't even have a beard. “I do hope so,” Eight says, still sounding quite cheerful. “Judging by your calculations this gives me about two weeks before it’s my turn, and I don’t quite fancy a trip to World One in the flesh right now. I do have other things to do.” Neville thinks he might be joking, at least a little. “Tell you what, give me two days to do some research. If we work together I’m sure we can have this sorted out before our counterpart in World Seven even gets a hint of what’s going on.”_

_“Oh, good,” Neville says, with relief. “The house is really crowded already.”_

_Eight laughs._


	4. Number Nine

“And he said he’ll come _here?”_ Hermione exclaimed, when Neville had exhaustedly explained his trance for the third time. 

“He says until I’ve learned how to spirit travel properly without using other people’s physical forms as conduits, it’s easier for him to come and find us,” Neville said, yawning. He still wasn’t entirely sure what Eight had meant by that, but he reasoned that if anyone would, it would be Hermione. “I’m telling you, if anyone’s going to be able to fix all this, it’s him; he used a lot of words I didn’t understand but he knows all about the related worlds; he even knew which one I was from, without asking.” 

“Brilliant,” One said, grinning widely. “You’ve only gone and solved it, Five.” 

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Hermione warned. “We’ve got a week before another one of you comes through, which isn’t a lot of time. Spirit travelling is one thing, but actually physically going between worlds is something I’ve never even heard of.” 

“And yet...” Three gestured dramatically to himself. Hermione gave him a withering look. 

“Anyway he said we should be ready at the same time tomorrow, and he’ll come and talk to us, and he’ll be able to make himself here enough that all of us can see him.” Neville yawned again. “And he asked some more questions and I told him about all my dreams and everything, and then he let me play with his quill a bit longer - ” Three snickered, but he was too tired to understand why - “and then I must have woken up. I don’t remember coming back through the Place Between.” 

“The what?” Hermione blinked. 

“The forest.” 

“Maybe you should go back to bed,” Two said, looking concerned. “You really look exhausted; I don’t think doing all this is anything like restful You haven’t had nearly enough proper sleep.” 

Neville groaned a little; he’d had to have a nap in the middle of the day for two days in a row now, and it felt childish. But he _was_ tired, as though he’d just taken part in a triathlon rather than just sat in a chair for twenty minutes while the others gradually got bored or gave up and waited for him to snap out of it. 

This time he did manage to get some proper sleep, however, and felt better afterwards, though he woke in a bit of a tangle of panic and rumpled sheets, worried that he might have actually slept through the night and the next day, and missed the meeting. But it turned out it had only been a few hours, and all he’d missed was lunch. Hermione and Number One had left again, to organise things for the next day. He made himself a sandwich and ate it with a great deal of satisfaction at his own independence. 

The others had stayed around the living room, to his surprise. They all seemed more comfortable now in each other’s company, even despite the presence of a werewolf in their midst. When he appeared at the door, Two offered to finally supervise him in some magic practice. He nodded eagerly at the suggestion.

“You could benefit from this too,” Two told Four, who had his head buried in some kind of picture book Hermione had brought him, but he only made a face. 

“I’ll watch,” he said. “No point setting the whole house on fire.” 

“You wouldn’t,” Two said with only a little impatience. “Never mind, just watch then.” He got out the melon he and Three had been working on, which looked rather the worse for wear, with multiple stab wounds all over it and sticky juice leaking from places. He covered the coffee table with a thick cloth before setting it down, and they knelt down on either side of it. 

When Two offered his wand across the table, Neville actually almost took it. At the last moment he snatched his hand back, horrified at himself. 

“What’s wrong?” Two asked. Neville could feel the others glancing over at him as well. 

“I… better not,” he said, quietly, his heart pounding. He had almost lost a hand. He doubted even Two’s Healing skills would have been able to put him back together if he’d been that stupid.

“Why not?” Two frowned. 

“Um....” Embarrassed, Neville tapped his wristband. “We aren’t meant to do magic. Just touching a wand, any wand, it’ll trigger a curse. A bad one.” 

“But…” Two looked both horrified and morbidly fascinated at once, “would it work? Isn’t it supposed to stop you going too far away from… from Bellatrix, as well? That hasn’t done you any harm.” 

“I think going between worlds must have cancelled out that particular curse,” Neville said warily. “But the shaving charm still works, so I’m not going to risk it, unless you want to spend the rest of the day picking up my fingers from all over the place.” 

Two looked rather pale, but Three had got up with an expression of interest and was peering over Neville’s shoulder at the wristband. “Can I see?” he asked, coming round to sit on the floor next to him. 

Neville glanced over at Two for a minute before reluctantly letting Three examine his arm. The man had got his own wand back at some point over the last day or so, and he used it to poke at the cuff, making Neville flinch. “Careful!” Neville muttered, cringing a little. 

“Ooh, there _are_ some nasty curses on this,” Three said, sounding excited. “Unbreakable, too. Cool.” 

“ _Cool?_ ” Two exclaimed, angrily. 

“All right, keep your knickers on.” Three tapped at his chin with one finger for a second. “You know, half the curses are already broken. Probably by coming through the worlds, like you said. I could probably get it off.” 

Neville shook his head. “They had a Cursebreaker look at it while I was in hospital,” he explained. “He said it wouldn’t come off, ever.” 

“Well, he wasn’t me.” Three went back to examining the bracelet, apparently unaware of the audacity of his own arrogance, and ignoring the fact that his adoptive mother’s name was engraved into one side of the silver surface. “I happen to be a pretty good artificer,” he added, as he worked. “And I’m good at curses.” 

“I bet you are,” Six muttered. 

“It’s _normal_ back home, all right? There’s a whole NEWT elective. I also took arcane objects, and I was top of the class, so there. Don’t worry about it.” He made a few circular motions with his wand that even Neville recognised as diagnostic. The cuff was a single piece with no join, magically sealed, and it was meant to be pure silver. Neville didn’t know much about how it was made, except that it could probably kill him in half a dozen different ways. 

“It’s actually a simple construct, but it’s… I mean, really dark magic. Who designed this?” 

“Voldemort,” Neville said flatly; his entire body was tensed in the expectation of his wrist exploding at any moment. 

“Right, the Dark Lord you lot keep talking about.” Three didn’t even look up from his inspection, to see that the others - except for Four - were all staring at him incredulously. He seemed to feel it, however, because he added: “don’t watch me, I need to concentrate. Focus on something else.” 

Neville grimaced and used his free hand to turn the watermelon. 

“You said you had some experience with wandless healing?” Two said, hesitantly, as they both tried to ignore Three muttering Latin to himself. 

“Not a lot,” Neville admitted. “I couldn’t fix anything serious.” 

“All right, try this little one here.” Two indicated a small split in the melon skin, probably one of the ones Three’s previous efforts had inadvertently caused. 

Neville found that focusing on the melon actually helped. Without realising it he started breathing in the same way he did when he was trancing. He touched the gash at one end with his right hand, and moved his finger along it, very slowly. It wasn’t quite the same as closing a cut in human skin, but it did feel similar. “Very good,” Two said, after a minute, and Neville blinked to see that he’d managed to close the split in the skin. There was a mark where it had been, as though someone had drawn a line on it in pen. “This time try it even slower, and really focus on closing from the inside out. Closing from the outside will leave a scar like that and you might leave some internal bleeding.” 

Neville breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, his brow crinkling into a frown as he settled back into the rhythm and concentrated.

He was so focused on what he was doing that he didn’t have a good sense of the time passing. He’d been sitting there working along to Two’s muttered encouragement for almost two hours when Three made a triumphant exultation. In the second that followed, a sudden painful shock ran all the way up Neville’s arm and he tugged it back with a yelp. “Ow!” 

“Ha!” Three held up the broken silver cuff in his hand, grinning widely. “Told you I could do it.” 

Neville stared down at his bare arm. He was already very pale, but the strip of skin where the bracelet had been was so white it was tinged blue; hairless and dead-looking. There was also a faint red line on either side, like someone had scratched him with a dull knife. After the initial shock, it was sore but not painful. 

“Wow,” Two said, staring.

“Okay, that’s actually really impressive,” Six admitted, grudgingly. 

Neville couldn’t stop staring between his arm and the cuff in Three’s hand. The band had almost split into two parts and the broken edges looked a little melted. He had resigned himself to never being rid of it even in this world, and now… there it was. 

“Thank you,” he said, still stunned. 

“You’re welcome. Can I keep this?” Three twisted the broken pieces around his fingers. 

Neville shuddered. “Please, be my guest.” 

“Cool.” 

Two sighed heavily, clearly caught somewhere between admiration and disgust.“Come on Five,” he said. “You can help me figure out what to have for dinner.” 

Neville glanced down as he got up from the table. The melon he’d been working on was now entirely healed, though a little deflated from lack of juice. The tablecloth would probably never be the same again. 

* * *

He didn’t sleep very well that night, but this time it wasn’t because he was dreaming into other worlds. He lay under the covers, rubbing his bare wrist and tossing and turning. The bed was too soft, the pillow too hot, and whenever he did manage to get comfortable, his mind went back to his successful trance and visit to World Eight, and anxiety about the next day’s meeting. He kept drifting off for a few minutes and then waking himself with a start, triggered by something lurking and shuddery in the back of his mind that he couldn’t name. 

When he saw the sun starting to come up behind his curtains, he gave up. He treated himself to a long bath, since Four was unlikely to get up for a few hours, and then wandered downstairs. He poured himself a bowl of cereal and was flicking through Four’s small pile of comic books by the time Two appeared, yawning. 

“You’re up early, Five,” he observed, sleepily. 

“So are you,” Neville pointed out. 

Two leaned against the back of the nearest sofa, looking at him for a moment. “Are you okay?” he asked, after a minute. “I can’t help feeling that all this… it’s a lot of pressure on you.” 

“I can handle it,” Neville replied, without really thinking. He _liked_ being useful. He added, “if I find a way for you all to get home, maybe One won’t mind letting me stay.” 

“You think he’ll mind?” 

Neville shrugged and stared down unseeing at the colourful pages in his lap. “Wouldn't you? Someone who looks just like you wanting to share your life?” 

“Well, it’s not like you want to be an Auror. Right?” 

Neville laughed faintly and shook his head.

“No fear.” 

“Well then. They can always give you a fake name. Set you up somehow. He’s a good bloke, y’know. You can’t blame him for being a bit on edge, after all of us showing up at his doorstep. Or trying to eat him,” he added, ruefully. 

Neville had to admit that this made sense. He still wished he’d had the chance to visit Number One’s parents. It wasn’t as though there was any danger of them recognising him, even if he had looked exactly like their actual son, which he still didn’t. But he thought he did understand One’s instincts when it came to keeping his life separate from the rest of them. That was probably the reason none of them had been introduced to Hannah. Still, just to see them one more time…

“Maybe,” he said, softly, and went back to pretending to read the comic book. 

“Five…” Two started to say, after a significant, slightly awkward pause. “I was wondering, if…” 

“Morning.” Six trudged in, stretching. He was wearing a t-shirt that showed the drastic bite mark on his arm to great effect. Neville tried not to look at it. “That bed’s pretty nice. Like a posh hotel, this place. You know we used this house as a safety for a while back home, til it got routed. But it wasn’t anything like this.” 

“I heard Harry put a lot of work into it,” Two replied. 

Neville stopped listening to their chatter after a while, and buried his head back into the comic, trying to distract himself from his own nerves. When the others came down they seemed to realise that he didn’t really want conversation, and returned almost straight away to doing their own thing. It was a bit of a far cry from Neville’s first couple of days in the house, when they had all spent all their time in their own rooms. Six was looking through an ominous looking book he’d probably found in the library. Four came and sat by Neville so they could share the comic books. Three was apparently making a study of Neville’s broken cuff, still, muttering charms over it. Two was making notes, or something, or maybe writing a letter. It was peaceful for a while. Neville realised that he could use Two’s wand now without any problems, though it felt awkward to ask; and anyway, Two seemed to have been impressed with his work yesterday without it. He didn’t think he’d need to be doing any great magical workings for a while. Maybe once everyone else had been sent home, he could get a new one himself. 

He was sufficiently distracted by this daydream that it didn’t seem very much longer before the doorbell rang. When Two got up to get it, Neville quietly followed him out into the hall. He watched Two check the mirror before opening the door. 

It was Hermione, of course, and Harry, Ginny, Ron, and the same Department of Mysteries people as last time, and Kingsley Shacklebolt, and Number One, dressed in - Neville blinked in surprise to see - Auror’s robes. 

“Hullo Five,” One said, coming over to him while the others traipsed back into the living room. It was the biggest room on the floor, but with how many of them there were now, they were going to have to add some extra chairs. “You all right? Bit nervous?” 

Neville grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, a bit.” 

“Ah, you’ll be okay.” One gave him a slightly awkward pat on the shoulder.

“Never seen you in those,” Neville dared, indicating the fitted, red, embroidered robes. “They look good on you.” 

“Like a weird mirror?” One laughed, which was perfectly accurate. Neville had just been thinking that once upon a time he might have imagined himself looking like One did now, fit and healthy and doing his father’s job. He told himself that while he would never be an Auror himself, at least he was making some headway towards the former. He was fitting out One’s old t-shirts a little better now, even after only a couple of weeks of eating regularly. 

As though reading his mind again, One handed him a bag. “Brought you some more stuff,” he said. “Share it out, though.” 

Ginny suddenly popped up over the back of his shoulder, making Neville jump. “We went shopping and got you all new clothes,” she said. 

Neville flushed. “Um, thanks,” he said, taking the bag. “I’ll um… pay you back, if I ever have any money.” 

“Harry paid,” Ginny said, shrugging, as though this negated the need for any return.

"Five," Hermione called from the living room. "Will you come and explain to Mr Gideon and Mr Levi -” Neville was almost positive those were not the men’s real names - “about what you told us yesterday, before anything happens?” 

He hurried back, and nervously explained to the Department of Mysteries officials about his trance to World Eight. They both looked a little doubtful, which Neville couldn’t really blame them for, but it helped that Hermione was nodding encouragingly at him the whole time. Around them there were several other conversations going on; Two was speaking in low tones to Harry, Ron and Ginny were in a circle with Four and Six, and Kingsley was leaning on the back of the sofa, apparently asking Three some serious questions, by the look on the younger man’s face. 

“Any minute now,” Hermione said excitedly, looking at her watch. 

As people stopped their individual conversations and rearranged themselves onto the furniture as though anticipating a house concert, Neville started to feel a bit sick, his nerves worsening. All these people were gathered here on nothing but his word. What if he was wrong? What if Eight never came? They’d never believe him about anything ever again. 

He went to sit next to Four on one of the stiffer dining room chairs that had been shifted into the room. At first there was still some general murmuring of conversation, but as the clock started shifting towards, then through, then past the time they were expecting their guest, the room descended into anxious silence. Neville wondered if they could all hear his heart pounding. 

“Are we sure it’s the right time?” Four whispered. “Maybe there’s a time difference between worlds?” 

Neville turned his head and was about to answer, when he heard Hermione gasp. When he looked up, someone was striding in through the small door that led to the kitchen corridor. 

It wasn’t Eight. Neither did the man look incorporeal, as Neville had expected. It was a tall, middle-aged man with dark black hair swooped back in a style that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1920s. Neither would his clothes, which were clearly very expensive - his black overcoat was heavily embroidered with gold thread, his shirt, waistcoat and trousers were perfectly pressed, without a single crease. He was smiling vaguely as he came in, looking for all the world like he had just popped in for a cup of tea, and carrying a long bronze cane which was obviously purely decorative, as every step was perfectly graceful. “Hello,” he said, and he even sounded like he was really there, and yet Neville could somehow _tell_ he wasn’t. “I hope I’m in the right place; not early, am I?” 

“That’s not one of us, is it?” Three frowned. “He doesn’t look it.” 

_“Sorry, sorry!”_ exclaimed another voice, much more echoey and somehow faint, and the slightly transparent form of Eight finally appeared in the middle of the room. _“Sorry I’m late. Had a bit of trouble navigating the World Edge. I don’t remember it being quite so hostile.”_ Eight looked a lot more like Neville had pictured himself as a spirit traveller, like a sort of ghost, but in colour. He reached up and pushed back his long hair with his insubstantial golden hand, looking around at them all. 

“It seems to be particularly volatile at the moment,” the tall stranger murmured. “Not really surprising considering the sheer instability of this series at the moment.” 

_“Ah, my apologies,”_ Eight said, as they all stared at the both of them. _“Allow me to make introductions - I am Neville Longbottom, of World Eight, as you may know - and this is Chrestomanci, the foremost nine-lifed wizard in the universe.”_

“Enchanter, to be pedantic,” Chrestomanci corrected him, still wearing the same vague smile. “My world series is quite far apart from this one, but it is my job to keep the balance between all the related worlds, particularly where it comes to magic. I do apologise, I should have noticed the anomaly happening here months ago, but lately I’ve been putting out fires all over the place.” 

“Excuse me,” Hermione piped up. She stood up, a bit awkwardly, almost like she was asking a question in class. “Are you… really here?” 

“Excellent question,” Chrestomanci replied. Hermione flushed pink, and Neville thought he caught Ron rolling his eyes. “And a difficult one to answer. My method of spirit travel is considerably different to most. I am both here and also sitting in the chair in my office. If you were to kill me, for example, not that I would like to suggest such a thing at all, I would only be forced back into my body. However, circumstances would then arrange themselves so that the life I lost in this world is also lost in my own, permanently. It’s all very complex and highly uncomfortable; I wouldn’t recommend it.” 

_“Chrestomanci has multiple lives,”_ Eight explained, seeing all of their blank, confused faces. _“It’s a fairly common thing in his world series. All the other versions of him that might have existed were never born, for whatever reason. It makes him a very powerful wiz- ah, enchanter. I thought we could probably use his help. I’ve already explained the situation.”_

“Very unusual,” Chrestomanci observed, glancing around at all six corporeal Nevilles. “I’ve only seen anything similar once before, when a young girl decided to improve her circumstances significantly by performing a spell which shunted each of her selves along by one world in the series. Very stupid thing to do, but at least it maintained the balance. I didn’t even notice it, and that was in my own series. What’s happening _here_ is causing disruption throughout all the related worlds. If it goes on much longer this entire series is likely to collapse in on itself, and maybe even cause further damage to some of the others.” 

“That sounds bad,” Three muttered aloud, and then looked a bit abashed when people turned to look at him. 

“Very bad indeed,” Chrestomanci said, apparently unoffended. “Billions of people would die, for a start. Not ideal.”

There was a long, heavy silence. A terrible sinking feeling was beginning to grow in Neville’s stomach. 

“But why is it happening?” Number One burst out, pink-faced. “I mean… its only happening with _us_ , right? What’s so special about us? I mean you’d think - no offence, Harry, but this sort of thing usually happens to you, not me.” 

“Based on my rather rushed research, I think I can answer that,” Chrestomanci said, leaning casually on his cane. “The answer is threefold. First of all, until recently there were nine of you - one in each world. Worlds which are similar to each other in a way which is reasonably unusual. Typically there are significant differences in things like history and topography which create a series balance, which was already lacking in this series. Secondly, significant turmoil in the majority of those worlds within the last five years put things even more out of balance. And thirdly... World Nine.” 

_“Our counterpart in World Nine was killed recently, as you_ _all know,”_ Eight picked up the thread. _“Apparently in a place and time he was not supposed to die, possibly in place of someone else who_ ** _should_** _have died.”_

“That sounds like divination,” Hermione interrupted him, sounding dubious. Neville couldn’t help but admire her bravery; he would never have dared. “You can’t know when or where someone is going to die - no one’s fate is set in stone.” 

“I invite a debate on the topic another time,” Chrestomanci replied. His tone didn’t change, he sounded just as uninvested as before, but he still managed to have the desired effect. Everyone was hanging on his every word once again. “In any case, the death of this unfortunate young man triggered a chain reaction. At almost the exact same time across all the worlds, his counterparts’ lives were inexorably changed in some way or another, whether for the better or worse.” _The catalyst_ , Neville thought. He remembered the way Bellatrix Lestrange had just happened to be in the market for a new toy that day. The way she had managed to see him, despite his drastic change in appearance, despite him trying to hide at the back of the cage. _Inexorably changed._

“The effect then - I think the best word would be _snowballed_ \- ” Chrestomanci continued, “and created a split between realities, centered on each of you, which grew linearly over time until it resulted in our current predicament. As you hypothesised,” he added, concessionally. “It’s something I’ve never seen before, but I suppose it proves that anything, in fact, is possible. The more the split widens, the greater the imbalance, and eventually the worlds themselves will start to collide.” 

“How do we stop it?” Two asked, leaning forward with his arms on his knees. “There has to be a way.” 

_“We start by getting all of you back to your own worlds,”_ Eight said. 

Neville felt like someone had poured a bucket of ice water over his head. He let out a choked gasp. “No!” Everyone turned to look at him, but this time he didn’t care. “They promised me I could stay,” he said, feeling himself start to tremble. “Me, and Six, too…” 

Six shrugged lightly. “I mean, if the alternative is everyone dying,” he muttered, “I don’t mind going back. I’ve got work to do, anyway, and someone has to do it; It’s probably worth going a bit mad eventually.” 

“T _he series can never be in balance with more than one of us in any one world,”_ Eight said, gently, looking Neville right in the eyes. _“It’s not sustainable, I’m sorry.”_

“I’d rather die.” Neville spoke without even thinking. “Would that make the balance worse? Will it still save all the worlds if I’m the only one who dies? I’ll go jump off the roof, right now -” 

“Five,” Two said, in a tone Neville had never heard from him before, and reached over to put a hand on his shoulder. “Take a breath.” Hermione had one hand over her mouth and her eyes were welling with tears. The others all looked a little shocked, but no one spoke up for him. 

“I won’t do it.” His panic took over all of his sense, he couldn’t breathe, and his chest was burning painfully. “I can’t go back there. _Pleas_ e don’t make me.” 

“Is this the spirit traveller?” Chrestomanci asked. He was still standing there quite casually as though Neville wasn’t spiralling into a full panic attack in the middle of the room. 

Eight nodded. _“Yes sir, the one I told you about.”_

“A little dramatic, isn’t he. Calm down, my boy. You won’t be returning to your home world.” 

Neville looked up. “What?” His head was spinning. “But… you just said…” 

“You cannot stay _here_ ,” the man repeated. “That would serve only to exacerbate the current disaster. And your world is not currently in need of a Nigel.”

 _“Neville,”_ Eight corrected, but not very loudly. 

“Based on calculations done by people much cleverer than me over the last twelve hours, your presence in World Five is not conducive either way to maintaining the balance. Therefore, your role becomes highly critical. One of you needs to stop the gap. Fill the space. Fix the hole. And you are probably the only one who can do it.” 

_“Well, I probably could.”_ Eight smiled. _“But I am rather busy at the moment. Luna probably wouldn’t like it if I up and switched worlds on her.”_

Neville stared between them, his mind still racing as he tried to catch up to them. “I don’t understand,” he said eventually. “Where do you want me to go?” 

“World Nine,” said Hermione, sounding more than a little breathless herself. “He means World Nine.” 

There was silence for a moment. 

“Is that any better?” Four asked eventually. “Everyone’s not turned into werewolves there, are they?” 

_“I don’t believe so,”_ Eight replied. _“At least not the last time I checked. Things are more or less stable there at the moment, in fact. More stable than they ought to be, under the circumstances - their own fight against the Dark Lord came a few years later than it did here. One or two volcanoes have gone off in the last month that definitely shouldn’t have, and a lot of inclement weather, but that’s by the by.”_

“It won’t be easy,” Chrestomanci said, and for the first time looked Neville directly in the eyes. His gaze was piercing, and yet Neville found himself unable to look away. “True interdimensional travel is quite rare, although there are a few people in my series who have achieved it. I married one of them. It will be made slightly easier by the open rift, but you will have to do most of the work. I’m not powerful enough here to help you.” 

“But I don’t know how…” Neville said, feeling every eye in the room on him. “I can’t even spirit travel properly the normal way.” 

_“Leave that part to me.”_ Eight nodded at him. _“I’ll help you. Teach you what you need to know to get there. But no one’s going to be pushing you through the rift this time. You have to make it on your own.”_

Neville hesitated. World One was safe. He already knew people here. He had a room of his own, and food to eat, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this warm. World Nine was an unknown. When he’d been there, all he’d managed to see was the forest where the last Neville had died. 

_“If it helps your decision,”_ Eight said, in a tone that suggested he knew it would, _“in World Nine, Alice and Frank Longbottom are alive and well. And currently grieving their son.”_

The terror did not so much drain away as become suddenly irrelevant, unimportant in the face of those words. _Alive and well_. He remembered hearing about the ruins of St Mungo’s. Knowing they were somewhere underneath. 

“Five?” Hermione said eventually, sounding nervous, and he realised everyone in the room was still waiting for his answer. 

“Okay,” he said, stuffing his hands between his thighs to keep them from shaking. “I’ll do it.” 

* * *

Because of the nine days that were due to pass in between each new arrival, they now had five days left to prepare and complete the switch before the door was opened to World Seven, forcing through one more of their number and potentially causing more volcanoes to explode, or worse. It seemed like absolutely no time at all, especially when Eight mentioned that it had taken him four years to learn to spirit travel at all effectively, and without draining all of his energy to do so. If Neville thought trancing was tiring, he said, actually forcing his physical body through the Place Between - which he called the World Edge - might actually sap him of his life force entirely. 

_“At that point, one of two bad things happen,”_ he said. He was sitting in the chair in Neville’s room, the back of the chair just showing through his transparent torso, while Neville sat cross-legged on the bed. Downstairs, Chrestomanci was explaining the details of the ritual which, when performed at the same time as Neville crossing over, would pull all the other Nevilles back into their respective worlds. _“Either you die, and the series collapses. Or you get automatically returned to World Five, and the series collapses. Either way we all die.”_

“Great.” Neville plucked at a loose thread on the handmade quilt he was sitting on. “No pressure or anything.” He was already starting to regret agreeing quite so readily to being the lynchpin upon which the entire plan depended. 

_“You really are the only one who can do this, you know,”_ Eight said, giving him a sympathetic look. _“I was being facetious before, but you’re a natural spirit traveller. You’ve done three trips within two days of learning; that’s something I’ve never heard of.”_

“I thought it was supposed to be easier because of the gap we made between the worlds,” Neville said. He didn’t understand a lot of what was going on, but a coincidence of circumstance made more sense than his being more natural at anything than anyone else. 

_“If that were the reason, all of you would be dream-hopping between worlds,”_ Eight replied, without missing a beat. Neville had to admit that this was something he hadn’t considered. _“You did that without even trying, and you have a natural talent for wandless magic. You’re very in tune with your own soul.”_

Neville made a face. “If you say so.” 

_“So here’s what you need to know. When you’ve been to the World Edge before, did you feel drawn towards any particular world?”_

“Yes. My old world.” 

_“Exactly. It calls to you, because it knows you belong there. When you enter the World Edge in your physical form, it’s going to be even harder to resist that pull. You must resist it under all circumstances.”_

“I’ll be doing that anyway,” Neville muttered. 

_“We’ll have to practice every day until the day of the ritual. You have to be very confident in where you’re going and how to get there. Right now it might not seem difficult, but the more time that passes between now and then, the more unstable the series gets, the more perilous the Edge will be. Chrestomanci and I will try to help you as much as we can, but to seal the gap we will all have to be back in our respective worlds. At the very end, you’ll be on your own.”_

“But what happens when I get there?” Neville asked, optimistically using _when_ instead of _if._ “To World Nine? If I’m meant to be dead there, won’t it be a bit confusing if I just show up?” 

Eight’s lips twitched into a smile. _“Good question. I will go ahead and find someone to explain to. It may take some convincing, which is time_ **_you_ ** _don’t have to spare.”_

“You’ll talk to - to his Mum and Dad?” 

_“I’ll talk to them. They will understand that you are not in fact their son, but I’m sure they’ll be receptive to looking after you until you can take care of yourself. I’ve visited World Nine a few times, and they seem pretty reasonable people. from what I could tell. Not that I’ve ever actually introduced myself; spirit travelling can be a bit unnerving to the layman.”_

Neville resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “What about Seven?” He asked, purely out of curiosity. “He’s the only one we don’t know anything about yet.” 

_“That’s where we’ll start our practice,”_ Eight said, switching back to serious mode. _“You need to know how to enter a World without latching on to another one of your selves like you did with me. Then we’ll try the other worlds, see if you can manifest properly_ **_and_ ** _get back without just letting the current drag you. We won’t be able to practice travelling in your physical form - we need the ritual behind the magic to do that - but the better spirit traveller you are the easier it’ll be for you.”_

Neville nodded. “Okay. Do we start now?” 

* * *

The forest was somehow different than he remembered it; the gentle breeze had picked up until it was more of a bracing wind, and the branches on the trees seemed longer and thornier than before. “What does it look like to you?” he asked Eight. “Hermione sees it like a library.” 

Eight laughed. In the Place Between he looked just as solid as Neville himself did, and his voice sounded normal too. It was weird to be sharing the forest with someone; he had until now been thinking of this place as somehow all his own. “I see a forest too,” Eight said, reaching up to touch a branch with the fingertips of his golden hand. “I imagine we all probably would, were the others to come here.” 

Neville thought that was interesting, but decided he wouldn’t probe further. They had a more important task at hand, anyway. 

“Show me World Seven,” Eight said, and nodded approvingly when Neville pointed. They started making their way down that path together, with Eight murmuring advice. “It’s very important to be aware of your body,” he was saying, “it might not be your physical body, but it’s the closest thing you have at the moment. Be aware of every part of you, from the top of your head to the ends of your fingers and toes. Don’t let the Edge decide how you get to arrive in the world. It’s also important that you know where you’re going - if you just wander in with no direction you’ll probably end up right by your counterpart or the last place they were.”

“Like in World Nine,” Neville thought aloud. “When I went there I just ended up in the forest where he died.” 

“The Forbidden Forest, yes. We’re going to aim pretty close to that this time. Remember Greenhouse Three?” 

“Yes…” 

“Picture it. It might not look the same there as you remember, but it’s the intention that counts. Picture where it is on the grounds. Picture how much of the castle you should be able to see from there.” 

It had been a few years since Neville had been in any of the Hogwarts Greenhouses, but he did his best to remember. Once he thought he had got it in his mind, Eight threw him off, muttering, “Your body, don’t forget.” He grit his teeth, and tried to focus on both things at once. It was very difficult. 

Eventually the trees seemed to thin out, and they were walking on the well-trimmed soft grass that surrounded Hogwarts. It was starting to rain, and the sky was grey with clouds, but the castle itself was perfectly visible through the wet. Neville stared up at it, eyes wide. He had only just been there with Hermione, but there was something very different from being inside the halls to actually seeing the magnificent castle from the outside. “At least this is still here,” he said, softly. 

“And not too far from Greenhouse Three,” Eight said, though it was hard to tell if he was actually impressed or not. Neville jumped as four children - who looked small enough to be first years - ran past them shrieking and holding their book bags over their heads. “Don’t worry, they can’t see us.” Eight started striding off towards the Greenhouses. 

“But you could make them see you if you wanted to?” Neville asked, hurrying after him. His feet should have been squishy in the wet grass, but somehow this place felt a lot less real even than the World Edge. 

“Yes, and you will too, with practice. Come on, let’s go and visit Neville Seven before he goes up for dinner.” 

Neville had quite forgotten that that was the purpose of this experiment. “Are you going to let him see you?” 

“No, I don’t think so. At least one of us should be oblivious of all this. Besides, I doubt you’ll be able to hold the trance for long enough.” 

Neville Seven was sitting behind the long teacher’s bench in Greenhouse Three. He was wearing Professor’s robes, and was sifting through a small stack of parchment in front of him. A couple of older students were working on what Neville thought were probably NEWT projects in one corner. It was quite peaceful, even with the steady drumming sound of rain on the glass overhead as the storm intensified. 

Neville, satisfied that he was invisible to everyone in the room, dared to go a bit closer. Seven looked more like Three than any of the others, he decided, though his hair was even longer, so long it had to be tied back. When Neville leaned over his shoulder to see the parchment he was marking, he recognised in the red ink marks his own handwriting. “Weird,” he murmured. There was a picture on the desk too, and he snuck a glance at it for good measure. “Is that _Hermione?_ ” he asked. 

“They’re engaged. Don’t get too agitated, you might knock something over.” 

Neville backed up quickly. “Hermione?” he repeated, making a dubious face. 

“What, you don’t think we’re clever enough for her?” Eight smiled again.

Maybe _you_ are, Neville thought, but didn’t say it aloud. The idea of being with Hermione just seemed wrong, but then he had thought the same thing about Ginny as well, and he couldn’t remember ever having been particularly interested in Hannah Abbott.

 _“All right. Better go,”_ Seven said suddenly, making Neville jump. 

For a moment everything around him went hazy and transparent, until Eight reached out and gripped his incorporeal arm with his gold fingers. “Steady,” the other man muttered. “You almost woke up. Stay focused.” 

_“Come on,”_ Seven was saying now, putting his parchment aside and waving to the NEWT students. _“Time for dinner.”_

 _“Professor, can’t we -”_ a dark-haired girl protested. 

_“Another time, Emily. You mustn’t stay out here in this storm.”_

_“Weather’s gone mad lately,”_ the other student, a boy, said as he gathered up his bag and went after them. _“Wonder what’s causing it?”_

Neville would have followed them out into the rain, but Eight stopped him. “That’s enough,” he said. “Stay any longer and you might get dragged back by the World Edge. We want to be in control of where and when we go.” 

Neville nodded sadly, looking around the greenhouse. He remembered some of the best days of his life spent here, among the plants. It seemed like another lifetime, some other Neville entirely. He wondered whether, if they had won the war on his own world, if Harry had survived and things hadn’t gone so very badly, if perhaps he might have ended up here, as well, wearing Professor’s robes. It didn’t seem possible, but clearly it was. 

He really didn’t think he would be engaged to Hermione, though. 

* * *

Eight showed him how to stay aware enough of his spirit to travel back through the Place Between to get back to his body. This time as they went through, he felt himself drawn to World One instead of Five, which was confusing, but Eight explained that he was being pulled towards his body rather than his own world. The more tired his spirit became, the more it needed his body to survive. 

They said goodbye in the Place Between, and within a few minutes he was waking back up in his own body, alone in his bedroom. The house was very quiet. He wondered how long he’d been trancing for. When he went back downstairs, Chrestomanci had also gone. Apparently it had been a few hours, because Hermione had had time to go and pick up a pile of books, and something of a command station had been set up in the living room. Three was fiddling with a box of tools and bits of wire, and Four and Six were helping clear most of the furniture away. 

“You all right?” Two asked, coming up to him as Neville slid through the door and past one of the chairs which had been moved inconveniently into the entrance. 

Neville nodded, and yawned. “Is it lunch time yet?” he asked. “I’m starved.” 

“Ginny and Ron are coming back any minute with food. It’s going to be very busy in here for the next few days; we might have some extra guests.” 

“Oh.” Neville looked around. It was difficult to put a name to the strange feeling that came over him, a combination of anxiety and disappointment. He’d gotten used to being surrounded only by his other selves, who, while they were all different to him, were recognisable extensions of himself. Even Three, who had terrified him at first, was now something like a friend. The sort of eccentric friend you found yourself making excuses for at dinner parties. But still. They had just all been settling into each other’s company, and now there would be other people around. And in just a few days they would all be gone. 

“Five?” 

Neville looked back up at Two, forcing a smile. “Nothing. I was just thinking I’ll be sad to leave you all, now.” 

Two smiled back and patted him on the shoulder. “Well, you’re a spirit traveller. You’ll be able to visit us now and then, won’t you?” 

Neville brightened. He hadn’t considered that he’d still be able to travel between the worlds even once the hole in reality had been repaired. After all, Eight had been spirit travelling invisibly for years. “Yeah,” he said, his smile now more genuine. “Yeah, I will.” 

“Great.” Two cleared his throat as they stood back to make way for the dining room table being unsteadily levitated through the door while others scrambled to move the chair out of the way. “Did you trance just now? Where did you go?” 

Neville told him about World Seven. Two listened intently. “But no one could see or hear you?” 

He shook his head. “Eight says I’ll get better with practice, but right now I’m not even as visible as a ghost.” 

Two clearly wanted to say something else, but Hermione saw them at that point and hurried over, wanting to know everything that had happened with Eight. Neville explained again about Seven, though he left out the part about the picture on the desk. It wouldn’t hurt her not to know, and he didn’t want to make things unnecessarily awkward. “Will you have to go again tomorrow?” she asked when he had finished. 

Neville nodded. “Every day,” he said, and yawned again. “He says I’m only allowed to go with him from now on and make sure I sleep properly at night or I’ll get ill. And I have to eat more,” he added, reluctantly. It wasn’t his fault he was so thin, or that too-large portions of food made his stomach uneasy. 

“Good,” Hermione said, business-like, scribbling in her notebook with a biro. “You better concentrate on that then, and getting enough rest. Chrestomanci gave the rest of us plenty to do. Two, will you be in charge of looking after him?” 

“I can look after myself,” Neville mumbled. 

“You’re very important to this whole thing, Five,” Hermione said, not unkindly. “We can’t take any risks. Just worry about doing whatever Eight told you to do.” 

“Food first,” Two said, and steered him towards the kitchen. 

A few of the cupboards were hanging open; their contents having apparently already been raided for whatever was taking place in the other room. Two made him sit down while he dug out some snacks, and though Neville would happily have helped, he was rather grateful to sink into a chair and munch on some crisps. The effect of doing a trance on your body, he decided, was on par with something like running a marathon. Not that he’d ever done anything like that, but it was what he imagined it might be like. His back and shoulders ached, even though he’d done nothing but lie down for a few hours, and it was difficult to keep his eyes open. 

“Do you know where you’ll go next?” Two asked, rather shyly. Looking up at him, Neville suddenly realised what it was the man had been hedging around all day. 

“Eight didn’t say,” he said, carefully. “But if you want me to visit your world, I could ask him.” 

Two’s expression twisted, something both embarrassed and hopeful. “Am I that obvious? I mean, if it could be any world, and it wouldn’t matter either way, I’d like…” 

Neville nodded and ate another handful of crisps. He was suddenly starving again. He wondered if he _were_ to eat more, whether it would actually help - he felt like he’d already burned through a couple of days’ energy in one go. “You want us to check on your family?” 

“It’s been months,” Two sighed. “I haven’t seen the twins since they were nine days old. I’ve missed so much, and no one will have any idea at all what’s happened to me. I’ll have just vanished into thin air. Tracey might think I’ve run off on her, or… I don’t know, been murdered in a back alley somewhere…” 

Neville felt guilty all of a sudden for not even considering this. No one cared that _he_ was missing. Lestrange was probably annoyed that her favourite slave had disappeared - privately he hoped she thought he had run away, which would make him seem a lot more clever than he actually was - but no one would _miss_ him. Everyone he knew probably hadn’t even realised he was alive in the first place. But the others would have people who missed them. Two’s wife and children. Four’s parents. Six’s hunter friends. Even Three’s friends and cousins. “Sorry,” he said, eventually. “I bet they miss you.” 

Two swallowed and looked down at the table. “Yes.” 

* * *

Eight was open to the idea when Neville put it to him the next day, when they met once more in the Place Between. It had taken a while to find him, as the forest seemed to have gotten even more overgrown and thick since the day before, and Eight seemed to have even more trouble getting around than he did. “If I wanted to find Two’s wife, Tracey,” he asked, thoughtfully, “could I do it the same way I found the Greenhouse? By picturing her?” Even though it had been a few years since he had seen Tracey Davis in person, they had spent seven years in some of the same classes, and he was pretty confident he could conjure up her face in his mind. 

“Very good,” Eight said, raising one eyebrow. “Excellent reasoning. I hope this is only a hypothetical question, however.” 

“I was tempted to try it,” Neville admitted, flushing pink even in his non-corporeal spirit body. He’d lain in bed for a few hours thinking about it, with the result that he’d only just woken up in time for breakfast before he’d had to go and lie down again to get here. “But you said to wait for you.” 

“The last thing we need is you somehow getting hurt or Merlin forbid _killed_ in another world,” Eight said, letting Neville lead the way towards the path that led to World Two. “That would really complicate things.” 

“Can that happen?” Neville asked, dubiously. 

“Not usually, but it’s happened to Chrestomanci, and given the speed you’re progressing at I don’t want to take any risks. Concentrate, now. Your spirit body and your destination.” 

It was harder to keep Tracey fixed in his mind than it had been with Greenhouse Three. He had spent the majority of his free time at Hogwarts in the Greenhouses, and had almost only good memories associated with them. Tracey Davis was someone he had only ever spoken to out of necessity for school work, and had never in the least warmed to. She was, after all, a Slytherin. 

Still, he must have managed it, because after only a few minutes of walking they came out into a sitting room in a fancy-looking house, not quite as grand perhaps as Grimmauld Place or even Neville’s own family home, but clearly something built a long time ago with even older money. Tracey Davis was sitting in a rocking chair nursing a baby. Neville quickly looked away, inspecting instead the pictures hung above the mantelpiece. Two was recognisable in several of them, and some other familiar faces, including - he was surprised to see - Draco Malfoy. 

_“Tracey?”_ A young woman had put her head around the door, her face a mask of concern. Neville vaguely recognised Susan Bones from school. _“Will you come and eat something?”_

Tracey rearranged her clothes and stood up with the baby in her arms, allowing Neville to get a good look at her. She looked miserable, with dark circles and red smudges around her eyes and her hair in disarray. The two women went together out of the room. 

“Can’t we tell her what’s going on?” Neville asked, watching them go. “She looks so sad.” 

“Try leaving a note,” Eight suggested. 

Neville frowned at him. “You could go visible and just tell her, couldn’t you?” 

“I could, but that’s not the point of this exercise. Time is of the essence here, Neville - you have to learn. Find something to write with.” 

Neville looked around until he came up with a quill and some parchment sitting on one of the end tables. There was an incomplete shopping list already on it. When he tried to pick it up, his hand went right through the parchment. He groaned in frustration. 

“You can do this,” Eight reminded him. “You’ve done it before. Concentrate.” 

Neville bit his lip and thought about Two, and thought about the dream he’d had of the day the twin babies had been born. How frightened Two had been for his wife and his children. How much he loved them. Neville wished there was anyone left in his own life he could care that much about. 

He managed to make his hand solid enough to pick up the quill. Then he stopped, wondering what on earth he could write that would make any sense, and not make Two’s family worry even more. 

Eventually, feeling his grip on the quill start to slip, he scribbled with some difficulty, in the handwriting that they all somehow seemed to share: 

_I’m coming home soon._

* * *

Neville woke up on the day of the ritual with his heart already pounding. He’d slept well and deeply, because Two had insisted on brewing a special potion that would let him get some proper rest, but the second his eyes opened, the realisation that today was _the_ day came over him in a rush of nerves. 

Ginny had found him a set of casual smart robes that actually fit well. He was supposed to wear them today so that he didn’t look like a total ragamuffin when he arrived - hopefully - in World Nine. Where they were waiting for him. 

Over the few days he and Eight had travelled to all the other worlds in the series - with the exception of both World Five and World Nine. Neville refused to go back to Five, of course, even knowing he would be invisible, and Eight didn't want him going to Nine to eavesdrop on the people he would hopefully soon be living with. “It doesn’t make a good first impression,” was his explanation, but it didn’t help much to ease Neville’s nerves about the whole thing. In the end it turned out to be a bit of a moot point anyway, as the World Edge had soon gotten so difficult to traverse that getting to Nine even in spirit would probably have been an impossibility. The instability caused by the anomaly was worsening all the time, and Eight told them all solemnly that if they had waited any longer they probably would have been too late altogether. 

Downstairs, the living room had been transformed into a kind of lab. A magical wire cage had been built to stop the massive surge of magic they expected from tearing the house down around them. The thing was so thick with wards that Neville could actually feel them if he stood too close, like a constant ringing in his ears. 

The ritual would open the gap between the worlds wide enough that they could all go through it in their physical bodies. The others would be all pulled back naturally into their own worlds. _His_ job was to resist that pull for himself, and find his own way into World Nine. How he was meant to do that when it wasn’t even possible to do it in spirit form right now, he still wasn’t at all sure. 

There was a big breakfast waiting for them all in the dining room. Lots of people were there, not just the six of them - Hermione and Harry had both been staying in rooms on the ground floor all week, and Ron sometimes, too. The Department of Mysteries people - several more of them had materialised over the last few days - had of course been heavily involved in the setting up of the ritual, and would be leading the event itself. Neville was surprised to see Hannah Abbot, for the first time - she was sticking close to Number One and staring around at the rest of them while trying to look like she wasn’t. 

People patted Neville on the back as he came in. He wished they wouldn’t. The mood was not exactly celebratory; everyone was too nervous for that, speaking to each other in low murmurs. Everyone had forgotten to be afraid of or annoyed by Three, who had been instrumental in helping to build the magic cage, and even Hermione seemed to be on good terms with him now. Neville hadn’t dared ask him about his plans for when he got home. 

He made himself put some food on his plate and slipped away to go and sit by Four, who was sitting to one side looking very serious and ignoring his bacon in favour of staring off into space. “What’s wrong?” he asked, quietly. 

Four shrugged. “Just… a bit nervous.” 

Neville smiled. “Isn’t this all just a dream, though? No point being nervous about something that’s going to happen in a dream.” 

Four sighed. “Well, yes… but I’m nervous about what happens when I wake up. How long it’s been. If I’m still in the hospital. If Ginny… if she’s okay. Or if I’ll even wake up at all,” he added, grimly. 

“Well if you don’t, then there’s not much point worrying about it,” Neville pointed out. 

Four rolled his eyes. “Eat your breakfast,” he said, sternly. Everyone had been quite bullyish about making sure he ate enough over the last few days, not just Two. “What about you? Feeling okay?” 

Neville tried not to let his abject terror show on his face. If he somehow got it wrong, if he let himself get drawn back… he’d end up back in Bellatrix Lestrange’s dungeon. The best case scenario in that instance would be her killing him quickly in a fit of rage just before the world ended. He tried not to think about it. 

“I’m all right,” he lied. The look on Four’s face told him he hadn’t been very convincing. 

They had set the time of the ritual for the auspicious time of eleven o’clock, which meant several hours of painfully anxious waiting while everyone else bustled around preparing things. This ritual, which was apparently not uncommon on Chrestomanci’s world, involved several potions (for which they had had to make ingredient substitutes - not ideal) a half dozen wizards chanting in unison, and a kind of magic that was utterly foreign to most of them. Neville was sure that Hermione was the only one out of everyone who actually enjoyed the challenge; everyone else was already starting to look very nervous. 

Just before they were about to start, Three came over from helping to put the final touches on the cage, which was more like a flexible kind of metal net suspended from the ceiling, and came over to where the rest of them had instinctively gathered in one corner. It was only the six of them - Eight couldn’t help them with this part. He couldn't even be there to guide them through the Place Between - it was dangerous enough that five of them were going to be there at the same time. Number One was going to take part in the ritual, but if it worked properly, World One wouldn’t let him go anywhere. 

Eight had said goodbye and wished him luck during their practice session the day before. Neville was now capable of controlling most of his substantiality in the spirit, and could make himself visible, though they had only practiced it so far in World Eight, where he was unlikely to cause an alarm. Eight told him that one day he might even be able to do magic while in his spirit form, but they hadn’t had any time to try it. The other man seemed confident about their chances of success, though he seemed to be the kind of person who always presented that attitude regardless of their actual feelings, so it was hard to take any real comfort from it. 

“Well,” Three said, jovially, though there was an edge to his voice which suggested it too wasn’t entirely genuine. “It was nice meeting you all, but I’ve had about enough of this hellhole.” 

Six snorted. “Someone ought to give you a look at some real fucking suffering, if a few weeks eating Chinese take-away is your idea of hell.” 

“Let’s not bicker just now,” Two suggested, looking around at them all. He glanced over at One, who had drifted away from Hannah to join their little group. “I expect you’ll be glad to see the back of us?” 

“Oh, I don’t know.” One grinned nervously. “It was sort of interesting, in a terrifying sort of way. Just no one else cause any tears in reality in future, all right? I’ve seriously got to go back to work at some point.” 

“Not going to be a teacher, then?” 

He shrugged. “Maybe one day. Five can ask Seven to give me some tips.” 

“Shame we didn’t get to meet Seven, really,” Four put in. “Just to complete the group.” 

Three chuckled. “I think we’d have run out of beds eventually.” 

For a moment they just stood there, looking around at each other. Two reached out and shook Six’s hand. “Good luck, mate,” he said. “I’m afraid you might have the hardest time of it.” 

Six shrugged. “Oh well. We all have to fucking die some day, right?” 

Four grimaced. “I’d rather not, if it’s all the same.” 

They all shook hands then, and Two even put his arm around Neville’s shoulder and gave him a bit of a squeeze. It was weird, because even though Neville knew they were really just two sides of a very weird coin, the same in every strand of their DNA, Two felt like more of an older brother to him now. “I’ll miss you,” he said, before he lost the courage. 

“Me too,” Two said, and smiled. “Good luck. I hope you get your fresh start, I truly do.” 

Neville swallowed and nodded. 

“Right,” said One, setting back his shoulders. “Let’s do it then.” 

* * *

They sat in a circle in the middle of the cage. They didn’t hold hands, because that would have anchored them inconveniently to each other, but they did sit quite close, and instinctively in world order, even though no one had told them they had to. From where he sat next to him, Neville could see Four shaking a little. In the corner the carefully-wound clock finally struck eleven. 

The Mysteries people began the chant, and a thick, acrid smell started to fill the air as the surface of the thick oily potions were lit and they started to burn blue and green flames. Hermione joined the chant, and then the others, until it was very loud. Neville shut his eyes tight, wishing he could hold onto something; the floor under him seemed to tilt as though the house were being rotated on an axis, trying to throw him off. 

He thought he heard Three let out a _whoop_ noise, and someone else let out a yell. Suddenly the ground seemed to go out from all of them entirely. For a moment it felt like being in freefall, and Nevile was so terrified he couldn’t even scream. 

Then, suddenly, he was back in the Place Between, in his actual physical body - he could tell, because it was a lot colder, and the grass under his feet felt much more like real grass. Around him there was an incredibly strong wind, like standing in the middle of a storm, all the trees whipping their branches violently back and forth, so that it was hard to stay upright. He could still just about see the others, but they were already fading away as the World Edge sent them back to their own worlds. He looked at Two, and the man said something to him that was completely inaudible over the roaring sound of the wind whipping up around them. And then he was gone. 

The forest started to fade in his vision too, until he realised what was happening - he too was being dragged back to his own world - to World Five. He grit his teeth and drew on everything Eight had taught him over the last week to resist the pull. Eight had been right; it was very difficult. He grabbed the nearest branch, and every muscle in his body tensed as he clung to it, keeping both his body and soul anchored to the Place Between. 

Nine. He had to get to Nine. 

It was much harder now to see where he needed to go. As a spirit, the nine worlds of his own series stood out as obvious paths, with all the thousands of others - other worlds in other series, Eight had told him - fading into the background. Now, with his real eyes, he seemed to see all of them at once, crossing over each other, some of them apparently existing at the same place at the same time. 

_Don’t try to see,_ Eight had said. _Your eyes will play tricks on you._

Neville shut his eyes tight for a minute and tried to focus with his mind instead. The gusting wind felt like it was actually trying to blow him off his feet, and he tightened his grip on the branch until his hands started to cramp. He could _not_ get pushed back to World Five. He would never get this chance ever again. 

In his mind’s eye he saw the pattern of the paths. Nine wasn’t far away, but he already knew that the Edge wasn’t going to make it easy for him to get there. Until the gap closed, and he took the place of the Neville that belonged to that world, the Edge would try to restore the balance by shoving him back where he had come from. He had to fight it. 

Bracing himself, he let go of the branch. His first step felt like his shoes had been filled with lead. His new robes caught on every twig, every thorn, and what felt like every blade of grass, and the wind constantly tried to blow him back. He clamped his jaw shut and focused on his direction. He didn’t even have to picture any particular place - he would naturally come out into the Forbidden Forest again, where Nine had died. All he needed to do was stay in his body long enough to get off of the Edge. But the Place Between could not have been more different now than it had been on his first visit. It was like trying to walk through a living, malicious hurricane filled with glass. 

The combined mental and physical toll of fighting the buffeting wind, resisting the pull of World Five, and the strain of keeping his soul and his body together, made every step an agony. He could barely breathe, as though he were trying to walk underwater, and the noise was surely louder than any natural wind had ever been. He didn’t dare try to cover his ears. 

_You have to do this_ , he told himself, screaming inside his own head to be heard. _If you fail, it’s not just you that’ll die. You’ll destroy all nine worlds!_

Lestrange was laughing in his head, jeering at him, clawing at him with her long, claw-like fingernails. He held his arm out in front of him, bracing himself against the storm, and saw the white ring of skin around his wrist. “YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING!” he shouted into the void, and barrelled blindly on. 

He was free. He didn’t belong to her anymore. 

* * *

* * *

He lands with his knees in wet leaves. Dark brown leaves, long dead, and the earth under them is damp and soft and real. There’s no more wind, no more branches reaching for him to drag him down. The air is perfectly still.

“Neville?” 

He peers up blearily through red eyes. He feels as weak as a newborn kitten. Through his blurred vision, he sees people hurrying towards him through the trees. When he looks down, the nice robes Ginny bought him are torn and stained. So much for looking his best. 

“Neville!” 

A woman with long dark hair is coming into the clearing, rushing towards him, and then she goes to her knees in the dirt, looking into his face.

“Mum?” he says, shakily. 

She throws her arms around him and holds him, sobbing, and he bursts into tears as well before he can help it. And then his father is there - not really his father, but in that moment it feels just as real as if he was - and more people calling his name, and blankets are thrown over his shoulders, and he knows he has made it. 

Someone must catch him before he hits the ground, because he’s asleep before he realises he is falling.

* * *

His best friend in this world, he’s told, is Draco Malfoy. He would have been more surprised by this if he hadn’t already learned that things that seem impossible, to him, are more than possible in the other worlds. Still, it’s difficult to reconcile it in his mind, and when Frank and Alice say Draco would like to see him, he refuses. They don’t push him on it, letting him focus instead of regaining his strength. They let him sleep in Neville Nine’s old room, which they have kept just the same as he had left it. They seem to be a perfectly normal Wizarding family - or at least they had been, until the war. It shows in the well-kept clothes in the wardrobe, the carefully curated collection of books and music, and the scrapbooks full of happy, if sometimes confusing photographs.

But every now and then, at dinner, or in the evening while he practices magic under Frank’s supervision - Frank teaches potions at Hogwarts and is a serious but patient teacher - the subject of Malfoy comes up again. Apparently he’s being quiet persistent. Neville defers on the issue several more times, until one day, perhaps a week after his arrival, he looks out of the window and sees a familiar, pale-haired man on the porch with his knees pulled up to his chest. And he’s weeping. 

A little unsteadily, as he still isn’t very balanced yet after his agonising and exhausting journey through the World’s Edge, he goes out and eases himself down to sit beside the familiar and yet unfamiliar young man. Draco looks up, stares at him for a while, and finally dries his eyes. 

Neville says, “Tell me.”

They had bonded all the way back in second year, Draco says, over a mutual love of Potions. Neville Nine had always been good at Potions, which had been one of his father’s strongest subjects and great passions. That year, old Slughorn had had to resign in disgrace of some kind or another, and Frank had given up his work in Magical Law Enforcement to take up the position. Neville was head of the class and not shy about proving his place there; Draco came to him in the spirit of competition, but what might have devolved into a bitter rivalry blossomed instead into something far better - a real friendship. Neville had agreed to help Draco with Herbology if Draco would tutor him in Transfiguration and Charms. Their unlikely little study group sometimes included others, but the two of them were at its centre, always. It made the teachers mutter, but Professor Longbottom encouraged it; the House system in his opinion was far too polarised anyway. Good to break down some of those barriers. 

“Course, he was friends with Harry too,” Draco sighs heavily, his voice shaking a little, and he couldn’t quite meet Neville’s eyes. “When he thought Harry was going to sacrifice himself to You-Know-Who, I couldn’t stop him. Ran after him, screamed myself hoarse. Didn’t do any good. He said we’d all be lost without Harry. Everything would go wrong, he said, and he was so sure, like he could somehow see the future.” He wipes his eyes afresh. “And by the time I got there it was too late.”

Neville leans into the steps and looks up at the darkening sky and wonders if Number Nine, who was confident and clever and good at Potions, had also been able to dream between worlds. Wonders if Nine had seen into _his_ world, where Harry was dead and everything was horror and darkness. That’d be enough, he thinks grimly, to drive almost anyone to sacrificing their own life and inadvertently almost destroying multiple worlds. 

He hasn’t told Frank and Alice that particular detail, though he’s done his best to explain everything else as much as he can, what Eight wasn’t able to impart during one hurried conversation. He already loves them more than he’s ever loved anyone, except maybe his Gran, and he thinks they love him too, despite the knowledge that he is a different Neville to the one they raised. They keep telling him how happy they are to have him, and that they wish he would stay as long as he likes, but a few times he’s heard Alice crying herself to sleep at night. He does his best to be enough, since that’s all he can do. 

Now he looks back at Draco, who still looks miserable but seems slightly better for having put that misery into words. He’s looking at Neville sidelong, as though trying to look like he isn’t. 

“Were you... more than friends?” Neville asks. 

Draco goes, if possible, even paler. “Why would you say that?” he asks, breathlessly. 

Neville doesn’t know. Maybe it’s the look on Draco’s face, or something in his voice. Maybe he dreamed it once, and remembers it now only as a whisper of an idea, but he can already see that he’s at least a _little_ bit right.

After a while Draco gathers himself, wipes his eyes again and chuckles wetly to himself. “He didn’t like me like that,” he says, shaking his head. “I… well, I worshipped him, but he fancied one leggy blond girl after another and never looked twice at me. Unless…” he looks up at Neville, eyes bright. “Unless you think… maybe he did?” 

Neville slowly shakes his head. He doesn’t know if it will make Draco feel better or worse anyway. “I don’t know. Sorry.” 

Draco laughs, a little bitterly. “Insufferable,” he says, low, and Neville doesn’t know which Neville he’s talking about, but at least he isn’t crying, anymore. 

* * *

After three months, he starts to dream again. 

He travels along the series, almost every night, drifting shapeless in the space between worlds like a wisp of mist until he can step out through the end of a tunnel that seems to exist only in his mind. It’s a lot easier now that the World Edge is once again whole, the forest is calm and clear, and he hasn’t forgotten anything that Eight has taught him. Not even his home world tries to drag him back anymore. Since he has filled the gap, he truly belongs to World Nine. 

Inevitably he finds his other selves. They are connected and always will be, and they are his connection to each world. He goes first back to World One, where Neville and Hannah usually are together, him attempting to cook for her with varying results, her helping him mark Herbology papers. It looks like he has made the change after all, to a more stable, less dangerous career. All things back to normal for him and yet somehow different, and will be different forever. 

* * *

In World Two he finds Neville and his wife, Tracey, and their twins, growing inches by the day it seems. Two is successful, and seems happy. When Neville makes himself visible, Two is overjoyed to see him, and introduces him to his family. It’s a bit like visiting distant relatives. Strange, but nice. 

* * *

He makes himself go to Series Three, even though it makes him uncomfortable. There he watches Neville Lestrange go back down to the secret dungeon room, again and again, each time taking food, potions, anything to get Frank’s strength up. Frank gets gradually less skeleton-like, and one night when Neville comes through, Three is waiting for him. “I know you’re there,” he says, and Neville makes himself solid enough that he can be seen. 

_“How’d you know?”_

Three rolls his eyes. “Maybe you aren't as sneaky as you think you are. I can feel you breathing down my neck.” He sighs and changes the subject. “You look good.” 

Neville looks down at his spirit self. A few months of good food - his adoptive father does most of the cooking, though he likes to help when he can - and proper sleep, and fresh air, usually walking aimlessly around the park with Draco, have put him in pretty good shape. He can see the others better in his own reflection now, even Three. _“Thanks,”_ he says. Reminded, he looks down to where a glint of silver is showing under the edge of Three’s robe. _“I’ve been meaning to ask you why on earth you’re wearing that.”_

Three draws back his sleeve. He’s fixed the broken cuff and added a fastening so it can be taken on and off easily. “It’s good for storing magic,” he says, twisting it around his wrist, and then, seeing the look on Neville’s transparent face, he adds, “And… it has my name on it.” 

_Neville Longbottom_ is the name on the cuff. Not Neville Lestrange. Bellatrix’s name is on it too, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Or maybe he’s filed it off. 

Neville smiles. _“You’re going to break him out.”_

“I can’t just leave him down there. He’s my father.” 

_“I know.”_

“I’m going to get in a lot of trouble. But Draco’s backing me, and he has people loyal to him.” 

Neville’s look of approval turns to one of astonishment. _“It… sounds like you’re talking about a coup.”_

“By the end of today I might have dismantled the monarchy.” Prince Lestrange sighs, then forces his typical smug grin onto his face. “And they’ll never see it coming.” 

* * *

He goes to World Four, but he doesn’t make himself visible. Four seems to have convinced himself that everything that happened was just a weird dream, even though he’s been told that he was missing from the hospital for several weeks. Neville doesn’t want to confuse him by suddenly appearing, or make him think that he’s crazy. The psychologist puts his disappearance and reappearance down to a kind of mental breakdown, but he’s allowed to go home now that his injuries from the car accident seem to have mysteriously healed beyond all expectations. 

Ginny isn’t coming out of her coma, and her family is talking about taking her off life support. So Neville goes back to visit Two again, and when he comes the next time he does a few simple spells, invisible to everyone in the tiny hospital room. Still, he might swear that when she opens her eyes she looks directly at him. Only for a moment. 

* * *

In World Six, the hunters Neville Six was leading have successfully truced with Lavender’s pack. Lavender wants Six to join her pack so badly that in exchange, she allows the rest of the surviving humans on the island to take ship for the continent. It looks like the battle for dominance between the werewolf packs might take years to resolve, but in the meantime at least Six is alive, and now second in command behind his new mate. The last time Neville visits, Six warns him not to come back again. Just in case. 

* * *

It takes a year before he’s ready. He’s stronger now, and braver, and he’s actually taken classes on World Eight to improve his spirit travelling until he can do it for hours without exhausting his physical body. Neville Eight has been instrumental in helping with the preparation, though he has warned him not to tell anyone else there about his plans, as the people on World Eight tend to be sticklers for not interfering with other realities. 

He’s also spent hours talking with One and Two, and several Hermiones and Harrys and even a Dumbledore, finding out how all their wars were won. He doesn’t think of it as interfering. What he is doing is finishing the job that he started. 

That night he lies awake in bed until midnight, listening to Draco snuffle lightly beside him in sleep, until finally he closes his eyes and goes to the Place Between. And then he goes down a path he’s never been down before, at least while he was consciously aware of it. He goes to World Five. 

He doesn’t bother with Lestrange, but goes instead to Malfoy Manor, drifting along its halls and walking through its walls like a ghost. The house is asleep, and not even the House Elves - who seem to have an uncanny ability to sense him even in invisible spirit form sometimes - come out to spot him. The servants’ quarters are easy to find, and the locked door to that part of the house is just as insubstantial to his spirit as all the rest. He steels himself and goes down the stairs. There’s another locked door, but he walks right through that one too. Eight has told him exactly where he needs to go, but he has to do this part himself. 

_“Hermione?”_

She sits up when he calls her name, her face full of confusion and fear; someone is inside her room, someone she can’t see. He makes himself visible, and even lets himself glow a little until she can see through the pitch blackness to make out his face. 

“Neville?” she gasps. 

Hermione is almost unrecognisable. Her long bushy hair has been shorn off short, her eyes are smudged with exhaustion. Who knows how long she’s been here, and what she’s been forced to do. By the state of the room, he doubts she comes out very often. He thinks about Hermione on World One, and about the one he’s gotten to know on World Nine, just as bright and vibrant and intensely clever as he remembers her, and feels his heart break a little. 

“Are you a ghost?” she asks, trembling and wide-eyed, and wraps her arms protectively around her chest.

 _“Yes,”_ he says, because there isn’t time for the truth. _“Sort of. I’ve come to get you out.”_

She stares, uncomprehending, for a full minute, until finally she asks. “How?” 

_“Give me your hand.”_

She’s hesitant, frightened, but she’s also still a Gryffindor. She offers him her left arm as though she knows what he intends. This part has taken months of consultation with Three, but he now has the spell down to a fine art. In seconds the silver cuff falls off her wrist, and he catches it before it can clatter on the floor, leaving it on the bed where it can’t be used to track her. 

“You can do magic,” she says, breathless. “And… touch things. Ghosts can’t..." 

_“Can you Apparate?”_ he asks her. There’s no time for explanations, not when they could be discovered at any minute. He won’t be in any danger, he knows, but if Hermione is hurt, it will be on him. _“We’re going to go somewhere safe, where they won’t find you. There are people waiting for you there.”_

She hesitates - he knows she knows how, but it’s been a long time since she tried. Especially without a wand. But if anyone can do it, he knows it's her. 

_“I think so,”_ she says, bravely. 

He tells her where to go and asks if she knows how to get there. She grits her teeth, and nods. Seconds later, they both arrive right outside 12 Grimmauld Place, London. 

“Are you sure it’s safe?” Hermione asks, staring up at the ominously looming building. 

Neville nods. Eight has done this part for him, so he knows it’s all right, though there’s something eerie about walking up to the house again. Apparently whatever spells of protection were put on it by the Order have held fast enough, and it still stands. Here live the members of the resistance group he had heard about, the rumours which had led him to try to be sold to London in the first place. He hadn’t been able to find them himself, but now Hermione has. And with her, with her cleverness and her bravery, and with the helpful intelligence advice left strategically about by Neville Eight, maybe they might actually stand a chance. 

From the gate, he watches her walk up the steps and ring the bell with a shaking hand, shivering on the cold dark step in rags that barely cover her. It opens almost immediately, and she is ushered inside, a muffled voice murmuring a happy greeting. When she looks around over her shoulder again, he is already gone. 

* * *

“Neville?” Draco mumbles sleepily, reaching for him. “You dreaming?” 

“Not anymore.” Neville yawns, and turns over. He expected to have been wild with adrenaline, but instead he feels finally peaceful. Finally safe. It might not be enough, but then again, it might be. He slings an arm over Draco’s waist and curls in closer. “Go back to sleep.”


End file.
